It's the words that match.
Match
Grade: A
Director: Steven Belber (Management)
Screenplay: Belber
Cast: Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: Nemesis)
Rating: R
Runtime: 90 min.
by John DeSando
“Not surprisingly, the disclosure of information about unsuspected paternity comes with potentially devastating effects.” David L. Katz
Match is essentially a three hander with Patrick Stewart as the epicenter of a talky drama that revels in the secrets and lies we all work with. Full disclosure: Stagey films are my nectar, where the spoken word, and never enough of it, is the drama. Although director Steven Belber adapts his play to this film, it receives criticism for being static—all the better, I say, to concentrate on what gives the most life to human interaction: words.
Tobi (Patrick Stewart), an aging professor of dance at Julliard, agrees to an interview by a troubled married couple. Lisa and Mike (Carla Gugino and Matthew Lillard), ostensibly for her dissertation on dance history. As in most good drama, all is not as it seems. The ultimate goal is to flesh out Tobi’s alleged paternity of Mike sometime in the ‘60’s.
Whether or not Tobi is the father (not certain despite cop Mike’s devotion to certainty)is less important than the dissection of Tobi’s solipsism, the release of Lisa’s inhibitions, and Mike’s coming to terms with the terms of Tobi’s paternity and Lisa’s happiness with their marriage. Although Match lacks the robust universality of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it stands up well at getting behind the characters’ facades and into their hearts.
Match is a literate take on the matches we make in life, such as Lisa’s apparent mismatch with Mike or Tobi’s unwillingness to match himself with his alleged son from his birth. Along the way is a match with a profession, benign with Tobi, not so with Mike, and not so with Lisa on more than one level. As the characters admit their mistakes, writer Belber offers the possibility that life choices may frequently be non-negotiable and for the best. Who knows? We’re all just doing our best given life’s limitations.
This is one heck of a drama, stage or film.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
