Summer is a good time to get caught up on the books I wanted to read during the school year and the movies I wanted to watch. One of the latter is Woody Allen's Match Point. Allen often gives the viewer's intellect something to chew on in his films, and I generally enjoy his stuff, even if it sometimes is gratuitously salacious, as Match Point is.
Match Point is really a conflation of Allen's earlier Crimes and Misdemeanors with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. The main character, Chris Wilton, is a British Raskolnikov, a Nietzschean Uber Man who faces a problem quite similar to that faced by Martin Landau in C&M. A woman with whom he has been having an affair threatens to spill the beans to his wife.
At the outset of the story Wilton observes that "It seems scientists are confirming more and more that all existence is here by blind chance; [there's] no purpose, no design." Allen returns to the idea of life being just a matter of chance or luck several times throughout the movie and ties it together brilliantly at the end.
In the same conversation another character opines that, "Despair is the path of least resistance." To which Wilton responds, "I think that faith is the path of least resistance."
Chris Wilton is a modern man for whom religious faith is never considered except once and then only to be dismissed with derision: A man who lost both legs subsequently found Jesus, Chris tells us. To which Chris' brother in law-to-be responds "Sounds like a poor trade."
But by the end of the movie Wilton is himself in despair, having, like Raskolnikov, drunk deeply of the cup of his nihilistic convictions. It is only incredible good luck that saves him from utter ruin. He recognizes that, given his disdain for faith, his life is meaningless and that there is no justice in the world:
"It would be fitting if I were apprehended and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice - some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning."
But for Chris life is without purpose, meaning, or justice, and consequently there's no moral obligation, either. All is chance, sheer luck. So it is for modern man without God. If God is dead, as he is for the Chris Wiltons of the world, then life is a great yawning emptiness that nothing can fill. It is day after day of meaningless, grindingly pointless existence. It is the life of Meursault in Camus' The Stranger.
Chris' wife chirpily proclaims that she doesn't care, she loves life anyway, but she is a woman who thinks little about anything beyond how to get herself pregnant. She plays Marie to Wilton's Meursault.
Wilton turns out to be indeed incredibly lucky (the movie's very clever ending is based on this), but one wonders whether his luck has saved him or whether it has condemned him to the hell of existing without purpose or meaning.
In Hannah and Her Sisters Allen says that he "doesn't want to go on living in a Godless universe. The only thing we can know for certain is that life is meaningless." Allen seems to have spent a career wrestling with the modern predicament. He doesn't want to believe there is a God, but he finds it difficult to live with the existential consequences of unbelief. Man has to believe in something, but if there is no God there's nothing worth believing in.
