Woody Allen Match Point Script Pdf

  

I've been a great admirer of Woody Allen as writer, actor and director since his debut 35 years ago with Take the Money and Run, and have enjoyed almost all of his films. It therefore gives me no pleasure to say that I found Match Point, the first picture he has made in this country, extremely disappointing.

Woody Allen Match Point Script Pdf

Woody Allen Match Point Script Pdf Free

The central character is Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), an Irish-born tennis player from humble origins who has decided to give up the tour (on which he enjoyed a minor reputation) to become a tennis pro at the exclusive Queen's Club in London. He seems clearly on the make and when we see him reading not only Crime and Punishment but The Cambridge Guide to Dostoevsky, we gather that ruthlessness of a felonious sort lies ahead.

Chris, we assume, is a homicidal arriviste like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and the ex-tennis star in Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. A thriller appears to be in store, pursuing the film's announced subject of luck and fate (compared to a tennis ball hitting the top of the net and coming down on one side or the other).

Woody Allen Match Point Script Pdf 2017

But Match Point doesn't become a suspense story until some 90 minutes have passed, by which time several of Allen's best pictures have run their course. Unfortunately, the unsympathetic Chris is an uninteresting innocent, initially without guile, a sad, wide-eyed social climber like the antiheroes of An American Tragedy (filmed as A Place in the Sun) and Room at the Top.

Woody Allen Match Point Review

Chris becomes friendly with an upper-class tennis pupil, Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), whose wealthy financier father (Brian Cox) has a country mansion, polo ponies, a grouse moor and an attractive, marriageable daughter, Chloe (Emily Mortimer). He's welcomed into the family. He is also smitten by Tom's fiancee, the neurotic American actress Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson).

She becomes his lover, he marries Chloe, thus getting a well-paid job in one of her dad's companies, and two themes dealt with brilliantly in earlier Allen films raise their heads. As in Hannah and Her Sisters, Chloe wants a baby, but Chris can't impregnate her. As in Crimes and Misdemeanors, a man needs to get rid of a demanding, unwanted mistress and turns to thoughts of murder.

The basic problem from the outset is that Allen, so much at home with the mores, pretensions and idioms of his native New York, is an ugly duckling out of water in England. Many years ago, while being driven round New England by a middle-aged American friend of my parents, I made a feeble joke. My host slapped a hand on my thigh and said: 'And they say the English haven't got a sense of humour.' Well, this appears to be Allen's view. There is not a single intentionally funny moment in the whole movie and the two local comedians he casts - John Fortune as a chauffeur and James Nesbitt as a plainclothes cop - aren't given one decent line.

Match Point Script Resources: Match Point Script at Script Fly (PDF,$) Match Point Script at scribd.com; Match Point Transcript at Springfield! Match Point Script - REVISED DRAFT.. At Script City (PDF,$) Note: Multiple links are listed since (a) different versions exist and (b) many scripts posted become unavailable over time.

Instead, everyone talks in clumsy, lumbering dialogue that draws unintentional laughter: 'I've got to meet my wife at Tate Modern. There's a new painter she wants to show me'; 'I think we should go for a ride tomorrow morning. We've got some wonderful new horses'; 'You could have been a poet with the racket the way Laver was.'

There's a lot of talk about business and finance, but Allen hasn't bothered to listen to City people and reproduce their jargon. Cops speak in a way that would get a tyro scriptwriter on The Bill fired.

When told that a script his studio had commissioned was full of old cliches, Sam Goldwyn told his writers to go and get some new cliches. This is what Allen has done with London. As in Mike Nichols' Closer and Richard Loncraine's Wimbledon, we get the London Eye, the London Gherkin (where Chris has a office) and Tate Modern, as well as the Royal Opera House, Aspreys, the Curzon Mayfair, a Thameside flat overlooking the Houses of Parliament and a Guards band in bearskins and scarlet tunics. Did I blink and miss the pearly kings and the Chelsea Pensioners?

On top of this, instead of the delightful selection of jazz music and old big band recordings that are among the customary delights of Allen movies, we have a succession of arias from vintage opera records hissing on the soundtrack to mark the passion for opera that everyone in the film shares. The effect is as if Radio 3 was broadcasting a marathon season celebrating Enrico Caruso and everyone in London was listening with their windows open.