In a twist, Allen gets right to the ‘Point’

If it weren’t for a few small, telltale details -- a character flipping through not one but two Dostoevsky novels at bedtime, a cash-challenged actress living in a charming London one-bedroom -- you might never know that “Match Point” was Woody Allen’s latest. For one thing, it’s set in London, and only one of the major characters is American. For another, there’s no Woody Allen character in sight, not even a thinly veiled British one. Nobody stutters or trips over the furniture, compulsively quoting Strindberg and Groucho Marx. It pretty much keeps its pulse steady, its blood cold and its nerves tamped down -- which, combined with cinematographer Remi Adefarasin’s architectural Hitchcockian flourishes, lends a queasy, cool air to the proceedings.

The main female characters -- Scarlett Johansson as Nola, an American actress, and Emily Mortimer as Chloe, an upper-class English girl -- have shades of Allen’s women, but their respective sensuality and sweetness keep them from ever going over the neurotic edge. The male characters, Chloe’s brother Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode) and his onetime tennis instructor, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), are perhaps tellingly stuffy in their tastes (both are young, gorgeous and straight opera buffs, of all things), but even this characteristic Allen tic, the loading down of his characters with dubious high-culture bona fides, slides by in this context. Watching “Match Point,” you could almost conclude that Allen is shedding some of his more calcified habits, that he’s molting.

This may have something to do with the all-new foreign setting. The movie was originally supposed to have been shot in the Hamptons, and I, for one, am very glad it wasn’t. “Match Point” plays out among the verdant tennis clubs, seigneurial country houses and airy lofts of London’s filthy, and apparently at least partially self-made, rich. It looks like Charles and Camilla territory, but it acts more like Rupert Murdoch. The Hewetts are outwardly democratic types with social Darwinist streaks. Had they been in America, they might have spent half their time talking about their court surfaces or racket strings and how much they cost. In England, they can live like demigods and pretend they don’t -- a distinction that allows Allen, for the first time in what feels like forever, to come across as wryly, slyly observant instead of out to lunch. Besides, Rhys-Meyers is almost absurdly sexy, making it easier to overlook the quirks.

Chris is an Irish former tennis pro from a lowly background, an ambitious golden boy with the face and grace of an angel -- lucky for him, he was born at a time when looks like his amount to money in the bank. At the exclusive tennis club where he’s just been hired, Chris meets Tom, the son of a wealthy businessman played by Brian Cox. Tom takes an instant liking to Chris and invites him to join the family in their box at the opera, and later home for a weekend en famille in the country. Chloe is instantly smitten with Chris, and soon, through very little effort on his part, he finds himself ensconced in a life of outrageous privilege.

The glitch, natch, is blond, gorgeous and trouble -- or rather, she’s the type everybody perceives as trouble, so trouble keeps getting heaped on her. Nola is engaged to Tom, a fact that vexes Tom’s mother, Eleanor (Penelope Wilton), to no end. It’s not just that Nola is a struggling actress and an American, no less, but she has a dark streak that brings out the most predatory instincts in smiling sharks like the Hewetts. It’s one thing for their sweet and fragile daughter to marry an ambitious young man they can mold and control; it’s altogether another for their son and heir to throw himself away on a brooding sexpot. Unlike Chris, Tom can afford to do as he pleases. Still, Chris is drawn to Nola like a lemming to a steep cliff. One rainy afternoon, after Eleanor has casually broken Nola’s spirit once again, Chris runs out after her to offer a shoulder and whatever else. There’s a sudden, waterlogged tryst in the heather, which Nola assures him is a one-time deal. So Chris marries Chloe, and Tom (none the wiser) dumps Nola for another woman. Chris runs into Nola again and asks -- consequences be damned -- for her phone number, and energetically paced, well-plotted tragedy ensues.

Well, maybe more high-class potboiler than tragedy, one you’re only too happy to get caught up in. Like “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Match Point” is a meditation on morality, though not quite as discursive and self-conscious. The Dostoevsky references, for instance, are kept to a minimum, though you almost wish they weren’t there at all. It’s interesting that Allen, after all these years and movies, keeps sending out for cultural reinforcements. After all, he does a perfectly good job of backing Chris into a corner like a rat all by himself, without any help from Fyodor, thanks very much. And Rhys-Meyers deports himself admirably in the role.

So, for that matter, do Mortimer and Johansson. Mortimer’s Chloe is sweet-natured but so pampered and sheltered she can’t inspire much more than a sort of benign, well-wishing contempt. It can’t have been easy to elicit that, but Mortimer does it effortlessly with a slope of a shoulders, an awkwardness in the gait and fleeting frightened look in her eyes. Johansson, meanwhile, is saddled with the burden of representation of one of Allen’s scorned women -- a role that has felled bigger girls than she. But either the director’s touch has lightened or Johansson’s earthiness goes such a long way to round out the edges that even when she tips into hysteria, she retains her dignity and power.

What accounts for Chris’ life going one way and Nola’s another? Chris, and Allen, have a theory: At certain crucial points in life as in tennis it all comes down to luck. When the privileged, blissfully ignorant Chloe, whose father’s money has bought her a house, a career and a husband, chirps something about the all-conquering value of hard work, it’s the funniest moment in the movie. “Oh, that’s mandatory,” Chris says, appeasing her. But he and Nola know better.

*

‘Match Point’

MPAA rating: R for some sexuality

Times guidelines: Deals in adult themes and situations

DreamWorks Pictures in association with BBC Films and Thema Production SA. A Jada production. Written and directed by Woody Allen. Produced by Letty Aronson, Gareth Wiley, Lucy Darwin. Director of photography Remi Adefarasin. Production designer Jim Clay. Editor Alisa Lepselter. Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes.