Review: Match

It should be said that both Carla Gugino and Matthew Lillard have long established themselves as solid, capable actors. It should also be said that they are both unequivocally obliterated by Patrick Stewart in the three character drama Match.

Match derives from Stephen Belber's play and Belber, in adapting and directing his own work for the screen, keeps the piece's theatrical roots fairly intact, allowing for few cinematic concessions such as the opening sequence observing Stewart's Tobias overseeing his dance students. Tobias is content with his solitude, preferring a night of knitting and soap operas to dinner parties - after a whirlwind of traveling around the world, first as a celebrated dancer and then a feted choreographer, there's nothing that he hasn't already done or experienced.

His routine is broken by Lisa and Mike (Gugino and Lillard), a married couple who have come to New York from Seattle to interview him for a dissertation she's writing on the history and future of dance. She's overwhelmed and impressed by his tales, finding them exotic, but Mike keeps steering the interview back to focus on a particularly heady time in the Sixties when dancers were backstabbing and promiscuous. It's clear that there's more to the interview than the couple are letting on as Mike, with blunt insistence, presses Tobias for more details about his relationship with a dancer named Gloria Rinaldi. Of course he slept with her, Tobias exclaims, "We exhausted ourselves with sex. That woman had more basic positions than Baryshnikov!"

Tensions mount, as do the volume of alcohol and pot consumed, and soon the true motive for the visit erupts: Mike wants to know if Tobias is his father. Though Tobias maintains it's logistically impossible - he always wore a condom during sex, even with Gloria - Mike is unwilling to take no for an answer, even forcibly extracting a DNA sample from Tobias as a horrified Lisa looks on.

Lillard practically passes out from the emotional and vocal exertions of this passage; this is where one can observe how the rhythm of the stage significantly differs from the rhythm of film. The theater allows for this 0 - 60 build, but onscreen the progression is too quick and, if Belber instructed Lillard to pitch his performance to the rafters, then that was a misguided piece of direction. The sequence comes off as too overwrought, the tenor too suffocating.

Fortunately Lillard's Mike is mostly offscreen for the second half of the film, which is a more contemplative section that has both Tobias and Lisa reflecting on choices they have made over the course of their lives. Gugino makes the most of these scenes, revealing a woman who has lived with a man who refuses to get over being abandoned by his father.

Match, however, is Stewart's show all the way and he commands our attention, no small feat given the wispiness and predictability of the adaptation. It is an unalloyed pleasure to hear the mellifluous growl, to observe each eloquent gesture. The cadence with which he proclaims "I am primarily a slip stitcher" is so delicious one could be satiated listening to him describe the details of each knitted sweater filling his closet.

Match

Directed by: Stephen Belber

Written by: Stephen Belber; adapted from his play

Starring: Patrick Stewart, Carla Gugino, Matthew Lillard