Scoop
Woody Allen (2006)
Sad to say, it’s as bad as you were led to believe. Woody Allen is Sid Waterman, a magician aka ‘The Great Splendini’, performing in London. Scarlett Johansson is Sondra Pransky, another American abroad – she’s a journalism student who gets dragged up on stage to go into Splendini’s ‘dematerialiser’. While she’s in it, Sondra is told by the ghost of a recently deceased newshound that a serial killer on the loose – ‘The Tarot Card Killer’ – is a young British aristocrat called Peter Lyman. Sondra and Stanley team up and get to know the dashing Peter; she finds herself falling for him – at the same time, she’s intent on realising her supernatural scoop. This is an unusually underpopulated Woody Allen film – it’s pretty well a three-hander for himself, Johansson and Hugh Jackman as Peter, and all three performances are bizarre.
Allen might be trying, through his appearance in this film, to persuade us that his movies can be better off without him. (He hasn’t acted since Scoop although he’s due back in front of the camera for his next picture, The Bop Decameron[1].) In trying to get to the bottom of Peter, Stanley and Sondra pose as father and daughter but it’s when they’re not involved in this pretence that their partnership is more unconvincing. Stanley doesn’t come across as paternal but he isn’t lusting after Sondra either. Deprived of the impetus of self-interest, Woody Allen is adrift – his trademark locutions ring hollow and unfunny when they have no traction with an ulterior motive. Scarlett Johansson is pleasant and radiantly pretty but she plays Sondra with such unsure gusto that she might be pretending to be an American; and she never manages to bring out the tension between Sondra’s feelings for Peter and her hard-nosed sleuthing. Hugh Jackman is pretending to be a different nationality; he hangs on to his upper-class English vowels with grim determination but the strain shows (and the accent occasionally slips). He’s remarkably bland: at first, I wondered if there was something clever going on – something to do with the idea that psychopathic murderers just seem nice chaps most of the time. As Scoop goes on, though, the blandness merges with your larger sense of disappointment. It becomes obvious how things are going to turn out. The fact that Jackman is weightless and implausible as a killer expresses the nothing-at-stake vapidity of the film as a whole.
Although Peter Lyman is a murderer, it turns out he’s not The Tarot Card Killer. This may be meant to pour scorn on the reliability of information supplied from the hereafter; all it does is to confirm the lukewarm quality of Scoop. In Woody Allen’s previous film, Match Point, the theme of chance provided some kind of pretext for the indifferent plotting: here, there’s no excuse for the slackness of a plot which needs to be amusingly ingenious. The dialogue is no great shakes either. It’s strange how Woody Allen’s way with words seems to desert him whenever, and only when, he sets a movie in this country. The Great Splendini’s onstage spiel is presented as if exposing its fake humanitarianism is satirically acute; as a comic idea, this is even more tired than the professional insincerity that’s being sent up. The accompanying music is just about the jauntiest element of Scoop – not least because it’s an unusual choice for Woody Allen (Grieg, Tchaikowksy). The cast also includes Ian McShane (as the dead journalist), Charles Dance (a living one, though it’s hard to tell with him) and, wasted in little parts, Romola Garai, Victoria Hamilton and Kevin R McNally.
14 October 2011
[1] The working title of what became To Rome with Love.