fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Match Point (Potential Spoilers Below)

I’m still trying to figure out why I reacted so strongly to these scenes. I’ve seen far worse on film, and been unaffected by it. I confess that part of it must be that Scarlett Johansson has to be the most boring major actress around. Had the cad been boffing someone like Kate Winslet, someone […]

I’m still trying to figure out why I reacted so strongly to these scenes. I’ve seen far worse on film, and been unaffected by it. I confess that part of it must be that Scarlett Johansson has to be the most boring major actress around. Had the cad been boffing someone like Kate Winslet, someone who had a modicum of wit or mystery about her, maybe it would have been easier to watch, instead of seeing a character betray his wife with such a dumb, dull bunny. But deep down, I don’t think that’s it. I think I just couldn’t stand to watch this creep betray his good wife like this. ~Rod Dreher

It’s probably best that Rod and his wife cut the movie short, since it doesn’t exactly get more edifying after that.  Personally, I found the movie rather engrossing as these things go.  It was simply a well-told story, and unusually coherent for a Woody Allen movie.  The Emily Mortimer character, Chloe, is adorable and Jonathan Rhys Meyers again excels at playing the arrogant bastard who exploits and neglects the woman who worships him just as he did in Vanity Fair.  We hate him just as much in Vanity Fair as we do here, but here we also pity him by the end in spite of the monstrous things he does.  Being lucky, as we see, is not exactly a substitute for being good, though it may bring you more victories in the world; Allen, known to all and sundry as the most depressing existentialist in the depressed existentialist club, was probably not trying to make this point, but that is what I took away from it.  

Chris is an unattractive sort of character to watch, but there was something Dostoevskyan or at least half-Dostoevskyan (i.e., sin, but no redemption) in the character as he plots and executes his crime (an idea not-so-subtly planted in our minds by a shot of the same character reading Crime & Punishment early on) that made me find it all strangely compelling.  Morally uplifting?  Not exactly.  Here is Chris’ speech to the ghosts who come to haunt him: “It would be fitting if I were caught and punished.  Then there might be some small hope of justice, some small hope for the possibility of meaning.”  Anyone who knows Allen’s thoughts on Life can tell you how the story will end, and it is not an ending that does much for the cause of justice or meaning.  On the plus side, Michael Dougherty’s ladyfriend will be cheering on the denunciations of ScarJo from now until Kingdom come.  From Michael’s article on celebrity adoration:

For some reason, knowable only to other women, my girlfriend loathes Scarlett Johansson. At first I was a typical thick male and believed we were engaged in playfully jealous banter, the type that is meant to elicit a small dramatic re-creation of courtship, in the threatened denial and then reaffirmation of loyalty and affection. This sort of thing always ends in a kiss. Unfortunately, as I came to discover, we were engaged in a theological debate with potentially eternal repercussions. Theological debates usually end with the launching of inanimate objects (blankets, shoes) and threats of excommunication (“Swear you reject Scarlett and all her perfidious works, or else”). We don’t talk about her anymore.

So Rod is in good company in not approving of her.  Personally, Scarlett Johansson doesn’t bother me (and Vinny from Entourage likes her, so she can’t be all bad, right?), but I understand that she is for some people what Gwynneth Paltrow is for me.  I cannot stand that woman.  Oh, she may be a perfectly good actress (though she deserved Best Actress for Shakespeare in Love the way I deserve the Nobel Prize for Physics and her role in Possession made me wish I had stayed home and read The Possessed), but her real voice–not her fake, British-accented voice that you hear in most movies–drives me up the wall.  Is there a person with a more annoying American voice in the movie business?  Is there someone else who could have made Proof more boring than it already was?  Was there anyone else who could have had you rooting for the main character in that movie to be institutionalised?

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here