Few movies fully investigate the extent to which luck determines human affairs. Most prefer to remain planted within the moral horizon at which the bulk of human thought occurs. It’s dangerous to depart from this stabilizing discourse. Similarly, few movies are willing to directly frame the issue of chance and its relationship to our feeling of powerlessness in a life which we’d like to think we’re actively shaping as we go. It’s safer to phrase everything within the language of free will and moral responsibility.
Woody Allen’s late-career masterpiece, Match Point, is an exception to this rule. In it, we see a series of cause and effect which appears as luck when seen from the point of view of the unfolding moment, and necessity when all the actions are concluded—as a great tragedy of Shakespeare’s might seem to its first audience, or as one of Pirandello’s masks might appear to the characters themselves, experiencing it for the first time. It’s only after every detail has been lived and set down that the true shape of a narrative and the relationships within it emerge. Luck, Allen seems to suggest, is the appearance of the moment; necessity the same thing seen with detachment.
“The man who said ‘I’d rather be lucky than good’ saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control.”
This is how Match Point begins: a voiceover spoken by the protagonist. Former tennis professional Chris Wilton, considers what will prove to be the theme and plot of the film. We see a tennis ball striking the top of the net in slow motion and we hear Wilton considering its implications:
“There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can go either forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.”
Having set out the theme in this way, the film proceeds straightforwardly, if not ruthlessly, to work out its implications. In brief: a retired tennis player gains employment in London at an exclusive club. He coaches and befriends the wealthy Tom Hewett, a man about his own age, though from the complete opposite social and economic background. Eventually introduced to Tom’s sister Chloe, Chris begins to spend time with the family—going to the opera with them in their private box, eating at exclusive restaurants, spending long weekends at their parent’s estate, and so on.
In some sense these connections are presented as lucky—he happens to meet a man his own age with similar interests, his sister happens to be available, etc. On the other hand, the unfolding logic is also interpretable as pure necessity: as an elite player, of course he ends up teaching elite clients; as a handsome and talented man, of course an eligible young upper class client is drawn to him.
Just as Chris takes up with Chloe, in large part because he’s flattered by her interest and drawn to her wealth, he also meets and falls for Tom’s fiancé, Nola Rice (played perfectly as a character out of a Tennessee Williams play, by Scarlett Johansson.). Eventually Chris and Nola sleep together, but in the aftermath, Nola wants to forget the indiscretion, while Chris becomes more and more infatuated with her and the escape valve she represents from the stuffy life he’s simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by. This inner tension develops, and the audience can see it, though we’re left to conclude that Chris is only peripherally aware.
Time goes by—Tom breaks off his engagement with Nola, and she returns to the U.S. As a result, Chris marries Chloe, enjoying the new job and money his connection with her family provides. Tom, too, marries, and life goes on happily for all—except for Chris there’s still something incomplete about it. He has gained everything he thought he wanted—wealth, status, ease—but remains fundamentally unsatisfied. Earlier he was pictured reading great works of literature and discussing opera, and we realize that his conception of the upper class was flawed: he imagined this life in an almost literary way. He anticipated excitement and depth, but got instead something very commonplace and boring, however privileged and easy. What’s worse, he finds now that he has to humor the spoiled whims of his pleasant but unremarkable wife, including her demand that they immediately have children despite what seems to be a fertility issue with one of them.
It’s into this context that Nola is reintroduced, just as Chris is exhausted by what he describes as the “mechanical” chore of trying to make Chloe pregnant. Moving back to London and running into Chris, Nola represents everything Chris actually craves and had mistakenly associated with the upper class: she’s the embodiment of excitement and sensuality, adventure and life lived to the fullest. But at the same time, having grown up without privilege, Chris doesn’t want to lose the status or wealth he’s acquired. On the edge of this precipice, they begin an affair. And with perfect irony, Chris manages only then to impregnate his wife—along with Nola.
Some will see Chris’ pursuit of Nola as a choice or set of choices, but the logic of the film is clear: he can’t control himself; he’s drawn desperately and against his better judgment not only to her, but toward the danger and excitement that she and the pursuit itself represent. It isn’t that Chris fails to make choices, but rather that these are the only choices he could make. His character is his fate, as the famous aphorism of Heraclitus is usually translated. The phenomena that we see as luck or chance when we don’t have all of the relevant information appears again as necessity and inevitable cause and effect later on when we do. They’re the same phenomena seen from different perspectives—and somewhere in between we cling to the idea of free will.
Though Chris tries to wait out the danger of his fraught situation, delay only increases the tension and terror of its inescapable logic. Nola becomes desperate and begins to demand that Chris leave his wife and marry her so that they can have the baby and get on with their lives. Chris prevaricates and delays as much as the situation permits, even pretending to go out of town for several weeks, during which time he promises to tell Chloe. But he can only wait so long, and as he tries to make a decision as to which woman he’ll choose, Nola sees him in London, just after he has claimed to be on a sailboat in Greece. All the frictions now come to the surface.
Faced with the inexorable momentum of the crisis, he makes his choice—or, he admits what has always been the only possible outcome—he must kill Nola and his unborn child in order to preserve his marriage and the wealth and privilege that come with it. Adventure and the contemplative life are fine, but wealth and ease are the preconditions without which such contemplation can’t be sustained. And so he takes a shotgun and shells from his father-in-law’s hunting gear, hides in Chloe’s apartment building, and kills her and a neighbor, taking jewelry and keepsakes in order to stage the scene to look like a robbery gone wrong.
Here, too, necessity passes itself off as coincidence. When Cloe summarizes the murder—or the newspaper version of it—she says that Nola ran into the burglar “by chance.” And similarly, when we see Chris throw the stolen jewelry into the Thames, with the neighbor’s wedding ring hitting the railing and bouncing back, we think we're witnessing bad luck on Chris’s part, and maybe some late measure of good luck on Nola’s, at least from the perspective of justice. But as no one could’ve foreseen, this apparent bad luck turns out to be good, since a junkie criminal finds the ring and is later killed, getting Chris off the hook, just when the lead detective was ready to pursue him more vigorously. “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from,” as Cormac McCarthy once put it.
What seemed bad turns out to be good, from Chris’s perspective. But we never could’ve predicted this with our limited information. Luck and necessity are different perspectives on the same phenomena. The nature of chance truly is blind, and our interpretations of cause and effect are often themselves blind. We only seem to understand events when we view them in retrospect, and then because they’re all fixed and complete. When the tennis ball hits the net (to return to the opening metaphor) and is poised above it, we have no idea whether it will go over or fall back, nor can we really say which would be to our detriment. This lack of understanding and foresight is the most terrifying aspect of life, as Allen has directly said in interviews over the years.
Our actions are swallowed up in a fog, and within that fog there’s no justice or meaning, only cause and effect, the outcome of which no one can entirely foresee. Each chain of cause and effect will appear to be either “good luck” or “bad luck” depending on how its final outcome affects us. This is the universe in which Match Point exists, along with most of Allen’s better films. And if you want to understand what that universe is like, pay close attention to Chris’ face at the end of the film. The rest of his new family are smiling, lost in the glow of obliviousness and illusion. They see meaning and purpose in their lives. They see Chris as a kind and generous man. And it’s not just that they fail to see his flaws—they fail to see their own as well.
Chloe is vapid and spoiled and has remained a child (she constantly refers to her “Papa” as ready to bail her and Chris out of everything—there are no real consequences for her). The brother, similarly, has never grown up; he lives a life entirely of pleasure. A key scene finds them all in a restaurant. Tom orders truffles and potatoes and then says “yum yum” in anticipation, as if he hasn’t yet reached even adolescence. Like his sister, his entire life depends upon his parents: their opera box, their money, their country club, country house, etc. Even the patriarch, played with a sort of jovial cluelessness by Brian Cox, stumbles blindly through his life, however successful it is: he has no psychological acumen, and loves Chris; his understanding of those around him is dim and imprecise at best; he’s insulated from most chains of cause and effect in the world around him by his extreme wealth. He can afford not to know.
By contrast, only Chris sees situations and people for what they are. He has to: the rest of the characters drift through their lives; he alone takes purposeful action on the basis of a clarity of vision which is necessarily a lack of sentiment as well as sentimentality. Chris sees both action and luck for what they are, and this vision is devastating. Knowing that he’s driven toward Nola in a way that he can’t control, he ultimately accepts the logic of the situation and, with it, the things that he must do. At first this is limited to deception and manipulation, but later the realization that, since he cannot leave his wife and life of wealth any more than he could have left Nola and his life of pleasure, he’s compelled to get rid of Nola in some other way.
It might seem strange to cast the obvious villain as simultaneously the clearest-sighted and most aware character. But think: who could be closer to the truth of this life? And what are the implications of this that we’re so desperate not to face?