The Heart Wants What It Wants...

"The heart wants what it wants," Woody Allen said when asked to justify his leaving Mia Farrow to be with her adoptive daughter Soon-Yi Previn. It seems to be a good way to characterize his latest film, Match Point, and indeed his entire oeuvre, once you get past the irrepressible zaniness of his early work.

"The heart wants what it wants until it doesn’t want it anymore," amends Danny Miller at this blog, in an entry which embodies Miller's somewhat tortured personal response to Allen's film. The film shows us Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, as tennis pro Chris Wilton, in a marital-sexual tangle with wife Chloe Hewitt Wilton (Emily Mortimer) and mistress Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson). Chloe and her well-to-do British family originally seemed just the ticket for Chris to segue from a dead-end lifestyle as a has-been tennis player to the career of a successful business- and family man. Only problem is, his heart wants Nola, not Chloe.

Until, that is, Nola (a) gets pregnant and (b) pressures Chris to devastate Chloe by telling her what's been going on behind her back.

Allen, who wrote and directed the film but does not appear on screen, breathes life into this stock situation by deftly showing us exactly what possesses Chris, Nola, and Chloe to act as they do, aware as they are at every moment that none of their motives could withstand the closest moral scrutiny.

(WARNING: Spoiler ahead!)

As luck would have it, Chloe's family estate provides Chris, or so he thinks, with the means — a shotgun of a type used by English gentlemen to hunt birds — to carry out what he intends to be a perfect double-murder. The pregnant Nola will be its apparently impromptu second victim, the first being Nola's next door neighbor, a widow who will be found shot after nominally interrupting a burglar (actually Chris, intent on misdirecting the police). Nola ostensibly (from the police perspective) has been killed, too, simply because she happened on the scene at just the wrong moment. Of course, Chris thinks he has removed luck from what he hopes is his carefully scripted outcome by staging the crime at the time just when he expects Nola to come home to meet him. Hence, it's hard for the police to imagine Nola as the primary, intended victim.

Even so, a canny detective, who has read Nola's secret diary and knows Chris was involved with her, literally dreams the truth one night ... but is talked out of pursuing the investigation because of, yes, a stroke of pure luck. In order to furnish evidence of robbery, Chris had taken the first victim's valuables, including the wedding ring off her finger, and tossed them off the embankment into the Thames. All smug, he had nearly walked away, then dug in his pocket and discovered the ring still tucked there. So he'd pitched the ring back toward the river, turned to leave ... and (as the camera shows us, but not him) the ring had caromed off a railing back into plain view on the embankment.

The stroke of luck which saves Chris from detection, pursuant to that accident of fate which at first seems like it will ruin Chris's game, is that a known felon turns up dead with the ring in his possession, which he obviously had stumbled on fortuitously.

Case closed. Chris gets off scot free.

The universe has given Chris the break he needed to score what is, in effect, his personal "match point" in the game of life; it has taken charge of the fate of the ring. What turns out to be the pivotal moment in the entire story is, if the viewer recollects, basically a reprise of a shot at the film's outset of a tennis ball striking the top of the net and falling, unreachable by the opponent, just on the other side.

(End of spolier.)


Match Point implies that the universe can turn a benignant eye on the moral wrongs perpetrated by a person who lives, however stupidly or clumsily, by the maxim "The heart wants what it wants ... until it doesn’t want it anymore."

That's a profound moral assertion — "moral" in the sense that, in Woody Allen's worldview, the heart's inscrutable urges trump conventional morality even (or especially) at some cosmic level. The cosmos can give those who follow the dictates of the heart a bye, where conventional morality would punish them.

I agree with that worldview. How tough, though, it is to say so. For it would seem to cut my religious views off at the knees.

Put another way, there seems to be an unfathomable logic to how things work out — for the best, I'd say (Woody Allen might not agree). There is an impenetrable governor of events which all our morality is blind to. It's as the Geoffrey Rush character, Henslowe, says in the movie Shakespeare in Love: "Strangely enough, it all turns out well" (see this post in another blog for more on that topic). Henslowe doesn't know how to prove it; it simply proves itself.


I use the phrases "turns out well" and "for the best" to indicate, not the outcome we think is morally "right" or the one we imagine we "want," but the outcome to which our heart, at the very last, gives its assent. The heart knows, where the head doesn't, that it wants Chris Wilton's fate to turn on what amounts to a coin flip. Chris is a protagonist we have come to like and identify with, who has done something terrible for reasons we don't quite understand and yet perversely sympathize with. Because of the awfulness of his deed, we don't want him to get away with it. Yet because he is a carefully calibrated stand-in for each one of us — thanks to Allen's scripting and direction and Rhys-Meyers's acting — we do want him to escape detection. So the "right" thing — what "has to happen" to make our hearts happy — is that the film's outcome must hinge on which side of a razor-sharp knife's edge the finely honed plot just happens to topple over on.

That's what I mean when I say that Match Point turns out well and for the best. It pleases our hearts, even as it confounds our heads.

But my religion doesn't really want to hear that. My religion has it that things turn out badly unless we toe a strict and absolute moral line. There is no gray area wherein the heart can overrule the head.


Million Dollar Baby is a film which makes a similar point.

(Sorry, here comes another spoiler:)

If you haven't seen this masterpiece directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, see it before reading the following.

Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, an aging trainer of prizefighters who against his better judgment instructs a "girly" boxer, white-trash Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank, in an Oscar-winning female lead). Maggie's career takes off under Frankie's tutelage, until finally, as a title challenger, she comes up against the dirtiest fighter ever, a taut bundle of pure malevolence nicknamed the "Blue Bear."

Maggie's opponent, being outfought, slugs Maggie hard from behind well after a round-ending bell, as Maggie is heading for her corner ... and the plot of the movie veers off in a totally unexpected direction. Maggie winds up in a hospital bed, paralyzed irreparably from the neck down.

It gets worse. Skin ulcers from her enforced immobility turn gangrenous, and she loses her leg.

But she doesn't lose Frankie, the only person on earth (other than Frankie's longtime protégé, Eddie "Scrap Iron" Dupris [Morgan Freeman], who serves as the film's narrator) who actually cares about Maggie.

Finally — she can talk — she requests that Frankie, a practicing if theologically confused Catholic, turn off her respirator while she is still able to remember her glory and success in the boxing ring. At first he says he can't and won't. His pastor at church even tells him he'll lose himself forever if he accedes.

But then he does it. Plus, he injects her with enough adrenaline to flatline her monitor instantly and keep her from any agony as she dies.

And the heart of the viewer, whose head has been rooting for some kind of impossible miracle to occur, thereby reversing everything bad that has happened, assents. It's what had to happen. It's for the best. Things have turned out right in the end — however tragically.

(End of spoiler.)

So, again, the movie gives the heart, not necessarily the head, what it wants.

I think there's a profound lesson here. The thing is, the lesson resists being put into words and thereby made property of the head. Here's the best I can do: what the heart "wants" is also what the universe "wants." The head, with all its moral intentions and religious precepts, sometimes just has to take a back seat to the heart, which wants what it wants.

And that's fine.