Matchpoint's Metaphysical Argument

A remarkable feature of Woody Allen's didactic Matchpoint is that its mild meta-theatrical elements draw amperage from the plot to make a loud and meaningful metaphysical remark. Nola professes to be an actor but is ostensibly deficient in skill while Chris does nothing but play parts, as member of high society, as keen cultural critic, as financier, and then most significantly as loyal husband. The result is a man whose belief in life's meaninglessness ensnares him in a dogged belief in fortune. When passion threatens this belief, the autonomous being rears its head for an act of savage violence. Faith in fate, it seems, can only be sustained at the dramatically high personal cost of defrauding oneself.

Chris's expressed fear in life is failing to make a contribution. This fear can be seen as the vehicle for the entire tragedy, for it prevents him from nobility in the time of his great decision. Far more profoundly, it is this fear which enables him to perform the spectrum of roles which comprise his existence. This tragic self-evasion makes the film something of a morality play, except in place of a principled constructivism we receive only the most befuddled nihilism. It's no wonder Woody Allen is so fond of the macabre creed from "Oedipus at Colonus" (he also used it in Deconstructing Harry)--where oh where has the nervous bard's optimism run off to?

Match Point

Against Psychological Plot Resolution

Since schizophrenics are unaware of their own psychological circumstance, it's high time that their pathology ceases to be exploited for convenient plot resolution in suspense/horror/thriller/mystery films. Unless such psychology is evident to the viewer from the beginning (e.g., Breaking The Waves) where the plot is about such dysfunction, a revelatory concluding twist is insulting to the type of dramatic realism which makes thrillers interesting in the first place.

In Stephen King's Secret Window, for a recent example, an otherwise compelling script is punctured and then deflated by a "surprising" yet by now altogether predictable and unsatisfying schizophrenia. What is the point of this? Is it at all suspenseful to find that cinema has been lying to us, that a character with every semblance of empiricism was the fantasy of another character? Hitchcock's Psycho, the popular genre's likely germ seed, takes severe pain not to give cinematic existence to Mrs. Bates. Contemporary audiences since the Usual Suspects have been prepared to suspect cinema's contents of dissimulation, and this is getting boring.