Mourning Wood

Scoop

Scarlett Johansson, Hugh Jackman, and Woody Allen
star in a film written and directed by Allen.

Reviewed by D.J. Palladino

Scoop’s most astonishing quality is the utter wretchedness of
its writing. A couple of Allen’s jokes zing like days of yore, some
flop, and many more seem like reruns. The driving joke from
Annie Hall, colleagues gathered to toast Broadway
Danny Rose, and the mock danse macabre from Love and
Death are all here, recycled and reused. Allen seems
uninterested in constructing believable motivations, or even
characters with consistent cores. Certainly Scoop is meant
to be the smiley-faced companion piece to last year’s brilliant but
unremittingly dark Match Point, and both were shot around
London rather than in Allen’s beloved Manhattan. Both starred
Scarlett Johansson, too, though she was a sultry temptress in
Match and here plays a corny-but-bright innocent who’s
abroad. That is, when she isn’t suddenly changing character to suit
the whims of Allen’s flimsy comedy.

Actually, I like flimsy comedies. But this is a high-concept
throwaway, the story of a journalist who returns from the grave and
leads Allen and Johansson toward a latter-day Jack the Ripper. It’s
remotely possible Allen fashioned this as a tribute to Hitchcock,
since it obliquely references Notorious and
Suspicion for romantic intrigue and Family Plot’s
unwitting psychics. More credibly, the film seems to be Allen
kissing off his own character. Never has his face gone more
flubbery and nattering and the stuttering delivery can only be
self-satire. In Scoop, Allen plays a second-rate magician
whose clichéd patter, we understand, will extend beyond the grave.
New dimensions in self-loathing, yet it seems pathetically like a
Catskill Prospero saying goodbye for a cheese-ball Shakespeare.

By my count, Allen has made 37 feature films since 1966. He’s
famously said that 80 percent of success is just showing up.
Scoop proves him mostly wrong. And we buy the tickets.
Maybe Allen should stay home for a little while, maybe read a book,
and then try for 100 percent for our sake.