***SPOILER WARNING***
I'm going discuss "Match Point" plot points, so if you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and skip this post. If you ruin the suspense you'll ruin the best part of the movie.
***SPOILER WARNING***
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However, I'm worried that Match Point is nothing more than a rehash of the "Crimes" half of Crimes and Misdemeanors--the Martin Landau story of Judah Rosenthal, who has an ill-advised affair and covers it up by having the woman killed when she threatens to tell his wife.
Can you speak to the similarities and allay my fears?
I hope so. As I'm sure you know, novelists often rehash the same plot over and over again. It can be pointless repitition, but if there's something truly new along with the repeated elements, new and old works can reveal each other through comparison, and both become more interesting. I think the latter is the case with Match Point; it does borrow the Crimes and Misdemeanors plot (which, in turn, borrowed the Crime and Punishment plot), but it also breaks new ground.
"New" is definitely the appropriate adjective. Given the sheer number of films Allen has directed, it's amazing to me that he could turn out a work so different in tone from anything he's done before. One can view most Allen movies with a kind of sardonic detachment, but Match Point doesn't give you that option. It's one of the most emotionally intense movies I've ever seen, and the suspense rivals Hitchcock at his finest. Allen achieves this intensity by presenting the C&M material in a much different form. Instead of following two sets of relationships with an ensemble cast, MP hones on one character and develops his dilemma at length. We don't begin the movie after the affair has become a problem; we begin before the affair ever starts and follow its entire arc. And the sex! There's more sex in that movie than in all Allen's other films put together. It's not explicit, but the passionate intensity of the lust makes the scenes where the protagonist blows people away with a shotgun believable. We don't see any sex in C&M (thank God!) and we don't see the crime (which isn't even committed by the protagonist).
MP demands that the viewer feel strongly one way or another about the protagonist. You can root for him or hate him or do both at once, but you're forced to take a deeply felt position. In C&M, people talk about sex and murder at length, but we don't see any of it, and consequently maintain more emotional distance. If C&M is a kind of witty insult to people expecting an upbeat Hollywood movie, MP takes the same people and tries to break them, to forcibly destroy all their trite expectations about how stories should end.
In addition to these differences in tone, MP deals with a slightly different set of issues. In C&M, we glean from the very first scene that Rosenthal is at the pinnacle of his career, that he has already acheived fame and wealth. His main fear through the first half of the film is that his fame will turn to infamy, that the good name he has established for himself will be destroyed through publicity. In MP, Nola and the protagonist don't fear that their good names will be ruined, they fear that they'll never make a name for themselves at all. They're marginal characters, caught between extremes of wealth and poverty, success and failure. Through most of the movie, we don't know whether they'll be professional successes and make names for themselves like Rosenthal, or whether they'll sink into obscurity. In this sense, they're simliar to the protagonists of Edith Wharton and Henry James, who must choose beetween love and money, or morality and money. They force us to consider whether popular notions of the good life are desirable or perverse. These issues aren't nearly as pressing in C&M.
Finally, Allen is extremely smart. He knows you'll compare MP to C&M--he's been there before you--and lets you know he knows by dropping dozens of wry little references to the earlier movie. The MP protagonist is chauffered in a light-colored Jag, and the C&M protagonist dirves a dark Jag. The MP protagonist's decision to take of the victim's wedding ring is a key plot element in MP, and Woody Allen's character notices that Mia Farrow's character never takes off her wedding ring in C&M. The hit man in C&M flees to New Orleans, and the misstress in MP is named "Nola," as in "
New
Orleans,
Louisi
ana." Many of these similarities may just be little jokes, but some seem to have larger significance. As I note above, comparing similar stories by the same author can sometimes make both works more interesting.
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***END SPOILER WARNING***
