"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. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win…or maybe it doesn't, and you lose."
Match Point (2005) is like a less murderous Talented Mr. Ripley, but this time the main character has already reached the station he wants to belong to- through hard work and through perfectly legal means.
In it, Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a retired tennis player who befriends the Hewett family in London by being their tennis instructor. He develops an affair with Nola (Scarlett Johansson), Tom Hewett’s one-time girlfriend, even until he has married into the family. Nola becomes pregnant and she presses Chris to leave his wife.
He has to choose between two women, and he does choose: He resorts to murdering Nola. In the process, director Woody Allen explores the nature of luck, and invites us to ponder the role it plays in our fate.
How does luck happen? Is it simply circumstance, or can it be helped along? When a ring is tossed into the river, Chris hopes that it will bury the evidence; consequently, he cannot be incriminated. Without him knowing it, the ring hits a rail, and it goes back to land, to be picked up by the police. We think he has did himself in, yet it is this very accident that will absolve him. How lucky of him.
Or is it?
He gets to keep the one thing he has worked his entire life for, but is it worth it? Without passion, without the stirrings that Nola arouses in him, is he fortunate to get away with it?
Luck is a big force in the conduct of our affairs, more than we care to admit. Allen shows us how it can also bring us to ruin.
* * * * * * * * * *
Thelma and Louise (1991)
“I can’t figure out whether these girls are smart, or just real, real lucky.”
“It don’t matter. Brains will only get you so far, and luck always runs out.”
To break the monotony of their lives, Thelma Dickinson (a housewife) and Louise Sawyer (a waitress) decide one weekend to take a short fishing trip.
A man they meet in a bar nearly rapes Thelma (Geena Davis), and Louise (Susan Sarandon) shoots him to death. They believe the police are not likely to buy their version of what happened, so they flee. As they head to Mexico, the police give chase.
Interestingly, Ridley Scott has worked mostly on male-centric movies (Blade Runner, Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, American Gangster among other things). There are so many of them, only James Cameron comes close to being so testosteronic.
In a recombinant genre, Scott turns two traditionally-male movie genres into a vehicle for two of the best female performances in the ‘90s. It is at once a road movie and a buddy movie.
They turn into fugitives from the law: they rob a convenience store, shoot a leering truck driver, and lock a cop in the trunk of his car. Signposts for the buddy action movie, sure, but a reversal of gender roles as well. You might even be reminded that Scott had directed Sigourney Weaver in Alien.
This raises the question of whether this is liberating for women, or yet another form of exploitation. In a key scene, Louise shoots the would-be rapist when he is no longer a threat.
The movie shows their journey to independence and self-assertiveness, culminating in a freeze-frame of the duo’s leap into the Grand Canyon.
The point is not that they make bad choices, but that they do make choices. They realize that there are options available to them, and these options are not to be dictated upon them, especially not by men. These are options for their taking, and they do not need to be alone in their journey. They are freed by their newfound power to assert themselves.
You consider everything that has happened to them, and you’ve got to ask: Do we just chalk it up to bad timing? Bad luck?
Screenwriter Callie Khouri shows what happens to women after years of being dominated and underestimated by men.
Thelma has a verbally abusive husband who cheats, while Louise has been waiting for too long for her musician boyfriend to commit. They decide to have a break, and it makes Thelma nervous. It is telling that when she points out they do not know how to fish, Louise retorts, “Darryl does it. How hard can it be?”
Along the way, we are given clues as to how women should be treated. Louise: “When a woman’s crying like that, she’s not having any fun.”
They achieve freedoms they might have not thought possible. Thelma finally gets to have a sexual experience that is not “completely disgusting,” and it is not with her husband. They may also have led criminal lives, but there will be no surrender: they would not go back to be trapped by the system. You can argue this is payback or a war of hate, but they have taken the matter in their own hands. The final freeze-frame tells us they are not giving up the freedoms they have earned, freedoms that should have been theirs in the first place.
Gender politics aside, Thelma and Louise remains a fun road trip.
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