Scoop
I play golf; Woody Allen makes movies.
This may seem like an inappropriate analogy, but it’s not. To some degree, we all need diversions, things we can get wrapped up in to help ward off our existential angst. Allen is lucky: He can make a living at his diversion. I’m a better-than-average golfer but not good enough to quit my day job. But golf is about as important to me as Allen’s movies are to him. It’s a source of joy, something I can immerse myself in so fully that I forget about everything else going on in the world. Would Allen make a movie every year if this weren’t also the case for him?
I’m serious about this. Ask Allen why he makes movies. He will tell you. He is a brutally honest interview subject. Scott Foundas did a great piece on him in LA Weekly last year that got deeper into his filmmaking process than anything I’d seen previously. It was also noteworthy because he got Allen to admit that some of his recent films aren’t very good. Allen singled out “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” in particular; I hadn’t seen him get so specific before. More typical is this, David Segal’s recent interview with Allen in The Washington Post, in which Allen, 70, explains that the process of moviemaking is a great way to avoid confronting the deterioration of his body and his inevitable passage into the void. He also explains that he doesn’t spend much time writing his scripts and that even if he thinks he could get a better take after the 6 o’clock whistle has blown, he usually doesn’t bother. A few years ago, I remember him describing himself making a movie as “like an institutionalized person who basket-weaves.”
In a way I admire Allen for keeping himself busy by tossing off movie after movie, year after year. But here’s the big drawback to his method: It’s insulting to the audience. If it’s obvious he’s not trying very hard — if he admits it — why should we bother? I’ve never seen him answer that question. Frankly, I can’t even answer it myself: I continue to see his movies even when I have reason to expect the worst. It’s my pathology. Why can’t I help myself? Probably because, despite his crippling limitations, Allen has given me a lot of pleasure over the years. And as “Match Point,” “Sweet and Lowdown” and “Deconstructing Harry” prove, he’s still capable. (That would be three times in the past decade, if you’re keeping score.) Imagine how differently we would regard him if those were the only three movies he’d made over that span!
All this brings me to “Scoop.” It’s not the worst movie Allen has ever made, as Stephen Hunter claimed in The Post, although Hunter was right about why it’s so bad. But if you want to see Allen at his nadir, try sitting through the tedious, insufferable, self-consciously Bergmanesque dramas “Interiors” and “Another Woman.” I would argue that the shockingly wheezy, flat comedies “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” and “Hollywood Ending” are worse as well. “Scoop,” after all, at least has Scarlett Johansson, doing her best to inject some vigor into Allen’s undercooked conceit.
Allen claims he has to shoot his movies in London now because it’s the only place he can find financiers who won’t meddle with his creative process. I think someone paying him to churn out crap like “Scoop” would be right to meddle. A studio director who showed the level of commitment that Allen brings to “Scoop” would risk being fired. The movie is astonishingly lazy. The gimmick is that Sondra Pransky (Johansson), a college journalism student in London for the summer, gets fed an incendiary story by the ghost of a legendary Fleet Street reporter (Ian McShane). Having a dead guy as Sondra’s source frees up Allen from having to worry at all about where the information is coming from. It’s hard to imagine thinner, more irresponsible storytelling.
Allen’s motive for making “Scoop” is transparent. After he watched Johansson burn up the screen in “Match Point,” he wanted to work with her again — and to perform with her this time. He doesn’t even try to inject himself into the story plausibly. He plays Sid Waterman, a.k.a. the Great Splendini, a magician whose tricks and shtick are as tired as Allen’s moviemaking. (I’d like to think there is some sly satire in the idea of such a lame act playing in the West End; after all, the London stage is where hoary old shows live forever, filling seats with tourists who don’t know any better. Allen can’t put himself in the company of “The Mousetrap” or “Starlight Express,” but he can play a performer whose Catskills gig would have run out in 1958.) Anyway, Sondra first sees the ghost while she’s acting as a volunteer for one of Sid’s tricks. Fine. But then, for no reason whatsoever, she insists that he accompany her while she does her sleuthing. That way, Allen gets to be in the rest of the movie.
I do appreciate Allen’s stylistic quirks, even when they shock me. He works with his costume designer to make Johansson, easily the most glamorous woman to grace the screen since Michelle Pfeiffer, look like Mia Farrow in “Hannah and Her Sisters.” She wears dowdy, curve-concealing layered clothing and big, round, gold-framed eyeglasses that went out of style in 1992. About the glasses, she says, “I need them. I can’t wear contacts — I don’t like putting my finger in my eyeball.” Johansson gets a laugh with this line. But this is Allen talking through her. Imagine any beautiful, blond, privileged American 21-year-old saying these words.
Allen is pathologically self-deprecating. He says he’s not a great artist, and that his best movies are happy accidents. At one point I would have called that modesty, but now I believe him. Even though he’s made a handful of great movies — including “Match Point,” released just last year — and a dozen or so very good ones, his work rarely has the ambition, depth of feeling or resonance that heralds art. And no one who takes the art of cinema seriously could release “Scoop” without being embarrassed.