303. Two posts in One!

Last night, I saw Woody Allen's Match Point. (Note to Goblin: by myself!) The past few days I've overheard many conversations about it. Sadly the content and extent was mere banter: "Oh, it's amazing." "There was no indication that that was going to happen!" "Wow! He was so hot!" It got to the point where I could stand it no longer and asked the random but nice strangers to elaborate. Time again I kept getting the same responses: "It's a plot driven movie." "It's not about the characters." "Go see it for yourself: It was amazing!" "Woody isn't in it."

What a curious answer, the Woody one. What a snappy answer. It's a line someone clever said once (I'm guessing a movie reviewer), others thought it clever, and now everybody is saying it only because it's snarky and cute. But now that I've seen the movie, I know why a better answer wasn't given. People find it hard to articulate why they liked the movie. They are probably puzzled by the fact that they did like it, and attribute it, I think mistakenly, to the "surprise" plot twist. I've always felt that movie reviewers do the movie going crowd a great disservice. They taint the movie with their own biases, analytical laziness, and psychological garbage. Perhaps when you are finished reading my little review, you will feel the same about me!

I will tell you now why people, myself included, liked loved this movie. It had all the elements of life: It was congruent. It was honest--and not the simple "I stole a piece of candy and now I confess" honesty. No, real honesty, true congruency, the thing of life we strive for, grow for, suffer for, ignore, deny, but ultimately need in order to be fulfilled in this life: the guts of life, reality, life congruency, character congruency, life honesty, the hard stuff, the stuff of existential angst, all angst really, life truth.

Brevity is wit, this is true, but life isn't brevity. It's messy before you figure IT out. It's messy while you figure IT out. Heck, I'm not going to lie: it's messy after, but just less so... you can clean it up with a paper towel.

IT= whatever IT is for you. (Ha! Thought I was going to figure IT out for you, didn't you? Well, sorry, that's your job.)

I emphatically and categorically disagree that the movie was "not character driven, but plot driven." Anyone who says this (a) did not see characters for who they really were, and/or (b) read and believed the typical crappy reviews that poison our thinking independent minds.

Woody Allen challenges us to a match. Can we break away from our hollywood-romantic expectations and hunger for wysiwygs(*)? That is, easy-to-love, easy-to-hate characters, formulatic, but enjoyable and easy to comprehend stories. (Jack and Jill fall in love. There is strife! Will they get together? Of course, and we are cheering all the way! Or seemingly complicated story (but not really), the one with a postmodern twist: Jack and Jill fall in love. It's unrealistic love, doomed for failure. Jack is smart and sexy. So is Jill. But Jill is a transgender female! Can they overcome their differences? Oh, the humanity, because they LOVE each other. And love overcomes everything, right? NO! It's disappointment! Disillusionment! They can't overcome the stuff of life, and we cry all the way, and say--perpetuate--the lie "but of course.")

The irony is that Woody did give us a wysiwyg. Only we are a postmodern group, and are blinded by the star's kissables, their perfect skin, their perfect beauty, and their perfect lusty-sexuality. Because we are so brain washed by hollywood and most likely, most sadly numbed by our postmodern society, we fail to see the characters for who they truly are, for what they truly do.

If we chose to not look deeper, to see Nola Rice (played by Scarlett Johansson) and Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) as two people caught up in their circumstance and not as people who made terrible choices (the worst: not developing their personage and character), then the movie is a coaster ride. And what a coast ride it is: we are thrilled by the lust-affair (wow, it's hot!), tangled up in the deception web, we ache for Chris to "do the right thing", hope that Nola gets that lucky break, and curse the nagging mother-in-law.

But when we wake up and realize that, in fact, Nola and Chris are yes, tragic, but painfully, clearly choosing to be victims of luck rather than masters of their own destiny, we are left with a big "Ah-Ha!" For me, I woke up with the Gumpian phrase: "Stupid is as stupid does."

Nola is a "struggling" actress, and pretends to even herself that she is waiting for a lucky break. (It is confirmed, too: Mom is always right!) She, like Chris, is your typical postmodern life underachiever. What is a typical postmodern life underachiever? Well, I'll tell you what I think one is, since I used to be one: a person who can do more, but doesn't. The "doesn't" is different for each underachiever. For some it's shear laziness, for me it was apathy and depression, and for the rest I think it's distraction. Like with Chris's character. In the beginning we hear him say that he wants to do something important with his life. His wife asks the question he should be asking himself, "Well, what is it?" If you can't even ask the question, how can you get down to the business of actually doing it, or at least doing something that leads to the eventual discovery of it? Instead, he goes to work for his rich father-in-law (our story's background hero and whisper of the kind man Chris could be, if only). Chris has all the outward appearances of having good luck, but we know the sad, sad truth. He is a lucky bastard. Things happen for him. If only he trusted his luck, and had the confidence, the will, the character to discover and pursue his passions. It is no surprise that the Nora-Chris romance went no further than initial attraction and lust.

Back to Nora. She thinks she is a "struggling" actress, waiting for the lucky break. Her lack of character, drive is what she is really struggling with. She is a whining, sniveling, soon to be shrunken nobody, who doesn't see that all she needs to do is, again, get down to the business of actually and wholeheartedly following her dream of being an actress. In the beginning of the story, Chris is further along his path of doomed destiny: he already gave up the thing he did, was good at, initially chose to do. He was a talented tennis player who did the cowardly show of false humility (outwardly praising the greatness of Agassi) and he deluded himself into thinking that tennis isn't what he should be doing because he didn't like traveling.

Interesting that I keep going back to Chris. His was the bigger tragedy. Nora's pathetic life ends in her youth. Chris will live to see his pathetic self become a pathetic old man.

Chris wants, needs to be a "victim." He wants justice for his crimes. He wants to be caught and punished. From the beginning of the film through the bitter end, you see that he gets exactly what he wants, what he loves. He loves despair. He loves tragedy. Like most teenagers, and some in their mid-life crisis, he mistakes angst for depth. By in large, no causal relationship exists between the depth of one's suffering, and one's analysis or quality of thinking about it. The ultimate and kind justice is that he has to continue living and his innocent, albeit blind, family will remain unscathed by his crimes, by the actions of his weak character. The weakness of his character goes a lot deeper than his beauty. And I'm not talking about the weakness of flesh-- heck, this the only time he is ever honest, real about who he is. Let the poor bastard have at least this, I say.

Nora wants Chris to "do the right thing", to leave his wife, be with her, and raise their child. A superficial understanding of the movie might lead us to believe that she is standing on good, solid, moral ground. The other superficial understanding of the movie might lead us to believe that she is wrong. That "doing the right thing" would be for Chris to stop seeing Nora, stay with his wife, and finally make her pregnant with babies.

For this is the very reason, my dear friends, Woody Allen had Chris do the unthinkable: kill Nora. Herein lies Woody's brilliance. He wants you, is forcing you to see that "doing the right thing" is a whole lot deeper than day-to-day decision making. Our postmodern society would applaud Chris if he left his traditional nest and lovely naive wife. People of an older generation would applaud Chris if he dumped tragic Nora and settled down with his family.

Woody is pushing us into second tier thinking. (I've hinted at my study of spiral dynamics in the past.) And BRAVO! This is also why people like the movie, but can't say why.

I'll say it again. "Doing the right thing" goes a lot deeper and further back than our day-to-day decisions. "Doing the right thing" requires us to first know who we are. That task is not as easy as it is to read the words. "Doing the right thing" is often not the easy thing. Nora and Chris continually did the easy thing. They were masters at deluding themselves and those around them that they were doing otherwise. Heck, most of us fall into that category, don't we?

"Doing the right thing" requires us to also consider those around us. Woody also did an AMAZING job at showing this, too. At first glance we might think that Chris considered his wife's feelings by not ending the relationship (their marriage). Did he really, though? No, he did the "easy" thing. What I discovered about "easy" is that often it ultimately is "hard." I think I'll have to elaborate on this in another post. The hard thing to do is oftimes the easier thing to do, when all is said and done... and some time passes. Only, you don't, can't know it at the time.

"Doing the right thing" finally requires us to stop. Stop everything and reflect.

----------
(*) Acronym from "what you see is what you get."