Woody Allen has long been torn between being Woody Allen and being Ingmar Bergman. Luckily he has most often been Woody Allen — the exceptions are movies such as Interiors, September (though that strayed into John Cassavetes territory — Cassavetes without the hysteria) and the recent Match Point.
His new movie, or at least the latest to reach us here in South Africa, is a return to Allen’s own special type of movie. It’s funny, in the way only he can be funny — a kind of American-Jewish humour based on European-style Weltschmerz. His own movie persona best sums up his general approach — he is nerdy but strangely sexy (to the women in his films, if to no one else), he is well read but wisecracking. He can joke about Dostoevsky.
This is a relief. Match Point was well made but rather dreary. Before that, his comedies were getting ever less substantial, becoming lighter and lighter — so light that some of them seemed to float away as the credits rolled. Now, at least, Scoop has some ballast and is genuinely amusing.
Perhaps the change of location helped. Allen left his usual milieu, New York (so much his own that he has practically defined New York on film), to make Match Point in London and stayed to make Scoop there too, and then a third film, Cassandra’s Dream (with Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell). Moreover, he has since gone off to Barcelona to make Vicky Christina Barcelona (with Pénélope Cruz and Javier Bardem). He is currently filming his 43rd movie as director (Untitled Woody Allen Project 2009), back in New York.
Whew. Perhaps Allen’s alarming prolificacy is one of the reasons we are only seeing Scoop now, two years after it was released overseas. That and the fact that Ster Kinekor’s Cinema Nouveau has become a cinematic ghetto for anything that isn’t a big-budget, megastar-driven Hollywood product, meaning that such venues have a huge backlog of films awaiting release even once the distributors have dumped almost anything with subtitles that hasn’t won a string of prizes and been on DVD for a year already.
Will we ever catch up with Woody? Let’s hope so. In the meantime, we have Scoop at last, and I’m pleased to report that it really is his best in a decade. Scoop steals its title, though not its plot, from Evelyn Waugh, and borrows some of its concept from Allen’s own Manhattan Murder Mystery. It also gives him a non-romantic role, which is a good sign (the only better sign, in his post-1970s oeuvre, being perhaps his absence from the screen as an actor).
Scarlett Johansson, Allen’s favourite new muse and female lead (though not, to everyone’s relief, a romantic attachment like his previous leads Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow), plays a young American would-be reporter visiting London. Johansson’s Sondra Pranksy is barely out of the nursery as a journalist, but for various odd reasons she is the one chosen by a deceased investigative reporter (Ian McShane) for post-mortem contact. He has a scoop from beyond the grave and he’s determined to get it out there somehow.
Allen plays the charlatan magician who unexpectedly facilitates this contact between the dead and the living. His Sid is an hilarious jokester dragged unwillingly into Sondra’s murder investigation. Between them they get into all sorts of trouble, but Sid keeps up a constant, almost compulsive wittering of wisecracks. This is anxiety transmuted into humour, and in this respect at least, Scoop is Allen’s most suspenseful as well as his funniest film for ages.
Hugh Jackman takes the role that was Cary Grant’s in Suspicion, which is hopefully not to give away too much plot. It’s a pleasure to see Jackman doing some charm and upper-class style, instead of the hairless angst of The Fountain or the hairy angst of Wolverine. Good support from the likes of Charles Dance is refreshing too — I can absolutely see Dance as the editor of the Observer and, for the brief time the newspaper features on screen, it even feels like a reasonably credible snapshot of how such a paper works.
Scoop is shot in simple, workmanlike style. It’s as though Allen has deliberately eschewed the visual dramatics of other movies of his (one thinks of Husbands and Wives and Shadows and Fog) in which he tried to do something exceptional with the camerawork. If he did so to highlight the excellent script, the deft characterisation and the welcome humour of Scoop, it was a decision that has paid off handsomely.