Scoop

Scoop is the comic obverse of Match Point (2005). It is a slight and ephemeral comedy that starts with the unlikely appearance of a ghost during the middle of a magician’s act and ends with the solution to a murder. Woody Allen must have conceived of these two films as a pair.

Everyone jokes about how Allen always places himself in his films in close proximity to beautiful young women. The accusation is not entirely fair, though it is not inaccurate either. He is hardly the only filmmaker or writer to imagine his aging self in the arms of youth. In Scoop, the young woman in question is the most fetching Scarlett Johansson, playing a student journalist named Sondra Pransky on holiday in England. Allen plays a whacked and eccentric aging magician named the Great Splendini, aka Sid Waterman. They first meet when she attends his magic show, and he chooses her from the audience to play a part in a disappearing trick. During the middle of the trick, while Sondra is hiding in a closet from which she is supposed to disappear, the ghost of a recently dead journalist appears and tells her that a rich aristocrat is a notorious serial killer. Sid sees the ghost as well, and as a result he and Sondra team up to investigate the ghost’s story. They make the kind of kooky detective team we saw played by Allen and Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).

Scoop makes a great joke out of the age difference between Sondra and Sid, and though he may feel her attractions, she has no interest in him and instead masquerades for much of the film as his daughter.

As the foregoing summary suggests, just about everything in the film is silly and improbable, and every scene in which he appears gives Allen a chance to do his shtick as the doddering, semi-competent Splendini, who has memorized a limited set of lines which he repeats throughout the film as he performs bad magic tricks in one setting after another: “I love you, really. With all due respect, you're a beautiful person. You're a credit to your race.” Allen makes fun of himself throughout the film and has a great time doing it.

The film feels a lot like a stage play, and the action moves around from one physical setting to another in an arbitrary way, as if the intention is to provide the characters a varying backdrop as they read their lines. There is a certain claustrophobia to the film as a result—many of the scenes could take place anywhere. There is not much reason for the characters to move or travel around—the story comes out as they speak to each other. Most of the humor and interest in the film comes from the dialogue between Allen and Johansson.

Allen and Johansson don’t take their characters very seriously. Both characters are fairly dimwitted. They stumble around throughout the film, bumbling into each other and ultimately into the actual truth of the mystery they’re investigating. At one point Johansson jokes that “If we put our heads together, it would make a hollow sound.”

Match Point is one of the grimmest character studies imaginable, a noir study of ambition and greed and class privilege. In Scoop Hugh Jackman plays a wealthy, aristocratic character named Peter Lyman, who is similar in ways to the lead character Chris Wilton in Match Point, but the difference this time is that Lyman underestimates his intended victim. This is the comic outcome of Scoop, while Match Point offers the most tragic of denouements. In the penultimate scene of Match Point ghosts appear to confront the main character with his crimes. In Scoop the deceased journalist’s ghost appears early to assist in outing a murderer.

An atmosphere of improvisation pervades Scoop, as if scenes have been written just before they are performed. This is not the way Woody Allen writes and makes films but instead is probably a result of his directing style and how he works with his actors. Splendini in particularly seems a fully improvisational creation, and we can imagine Allen winging it with this character, whom he inhabits and seems to understand fairly well. The Great Splendini is, after all, another version of Woody Allen the director and actor and stand-up comedian, who has been doing this sort of thing for nearly fifty years now.

Allen relishes the small kind of drama he gives us in Scoop. The stakes are not large, but they are fully and engagingly illuminated. If Scoop is simply another vehicle that allows Woody Allen to do his thing, so be it. Though many of his recent films have been lackluster, Scoop is full of energy and vitality, the result not only of chemistry between Allen and Johansson but also of the fact that Allen still loves and enjoys what he does.

There is an interesting link connecting this film with Allen’s 1975 comedy Love and Death and, thereby, with Allen’s idol Ingmar Bergman. Anyone who recognizes the connection between Love and Death and The Seventh Seal will recognize the link in Scoop.