“I love my life. I regret my life. The lines eventually blur, and it’s just . . . my life.”
What is the difference between strangers and family, and how do you tell them apart? Sometimes people are both, or neither, or both and neither, and figuring out who is what can be a very messy process indeed.
It is really hard to review a movie where you can’t summarize the plot at all, because to do so would spoil the twists and turns. To disclose what happens would be to spill the lifeblood of this movie. Since I can’t describe the action, all I can do is describe the themes and hope that suffices. Match is a story about looking back at life with regrets about the road not travelled, the choices not made. It’s also about the value of accepting life as it is, and letting go. It’s an intense, funny, sad, and cathartic piece of work.
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There’s a lot of humor in the dialog, mainly due to Patrick Stewart’s somewhat faux outrageousness. The humor helps the viewer engage with the story track, which can be heavy. It’s a very funny movie, but at times it could have been even funnier: there’s one scene in particular regarding oral sex which should have been hilarious, but the timing was just a hair off. I don’t know if it was an acting problem, a directing problem, or an editing problem.
The film has the feel of being (barely) adapted from a stage play. Almost all the action takes place within an apartment, and the scenes which were filmed in the nearby environs feel like they were tacked on as a concession to make the transition from stage to film. However, that decision does add to the claustrophobic feel of the film, heightening the pitch of the emotional peaks, so maybe it was done consciously. Even if the claustrophobia was unintentional, it intensifies a movie that already feels very intimate, perhaps intrusively so.
Writer/director Stephen Belber keeps the movie short, about an hour and a half, which was wise because you must, you just must, watch it twice. All the actors turn in first-rate performances here, especially Matt Lillard and Carla Gugino, but they can only be truly appreciated on a second viewing. Matt Lillard’s Mike is a particularly outstanding creation, which is only revealed if you watch the movie again. It takes another look to appreciate the brilliance of Lillard’s performance, which really shines. He takes a difficult role which requires both a lot of subtlety and a lot of balls and just nails it. He is a master of micro-expressions, and yet when he has to do a big emotional thing he can even change his skin color to match the emotions of the scene. He plays this part – not a sympathetic character- so well that he’ll probably never work again.
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Patrick Stewart plays Toby Powell, an aged former ballet star of free range sexuality. He has learned through dancing and teaching dancing how to roll with life’s vicissitudes – and how to impart that same ability to his students. He considers his life’s work to be teaching kids how to be free, and there is irony in that that only becomes apparent on the second viewing.
Do I detect a slight odor of ham? Stewart plays his role with a kind of “wtf” insouciance which almost works. He doesn’t chew the scenery, but he does eye it and salivate a little. And yet I didn’t quite “feel” him, though the character has a larger than life quality. Stewart is an “acting actor”, by which I mean that you never forget he’s acting, but you are always aware of how well he’s doing it.
I’m going to have to admit here that I have seen every single episode of Star Trek: Next Generation (that’s the first time I actually had to spell that out, instead of “ST:NG”, wow) and all the Berman-era entries in the movie franchise at least once. I kept writing “Picard” instead of “Stewart” and had to go back and correct that while doing this review. So it’s just possible that maybe I am not the most unbiased person to write this review because it felt like I was watching Picard after his brain had been infiltrated by some sort of alien with a nefarious purpose which almost transformed Picard into a vivacious bi-sexual ballet master, but the procedure didn’t actually work and he just went along with it to see how he could foil the plot from within. Got that? In other words, I felt like I was not watching the character Toby Powell, I was watching Picard/Stewart playing Toby Powell, which is a different experience. I’m not sure if that was my fault or his fault or nobody’s fault, but I’m laying this all out there in the interest of full disclosure.
Perhaps I should mention that I had a life-size cutout of Worf in my office in the nineties.
I still have it.
No, you can’t borrow it.
The point of this big reveal is that I feel uncomfortable criticizing Patrick Stewart, because I’m a fan. He’s been so good in so many things, and he is good in the role, but I just didn’t feel like he fully inhabited the character. Maybe someone with less NextGen baggage wouldn’t have felt the disconnect from his character that I experienced.
So, I don’t know whether I’m glad or sad that he didn’t stand up, pull his shirt down, and wink at the camera.
I was really ambivalent about his performance. I was also ambivalent about the movie as a whole. I enjoyed it, the acting varies from superior to incomparable, and the twists and turns are a joy to ride. But I never stopped wondering how soon it would be over. The entire movie feels like an overshare, awkward, at times uncomfortable, and an invasion of my personal space, which is pretty amazing considering I was watching it on a screen.
Ambivalence sometimes can be a deeper experience than a single clear emotion, because it is multiple deep feelings at once, which go in different directions. Match is a very effective, affecting, endearing, exhausting film that is well-written and well-acted, and I would recommend it to people who don’t mind movies in which most of the action consists of talking. I liked it, both times. I did. I’m so glad I got to see it, but at the same time I hope I never see it again.
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