Scoop. Directed (and written) by Woody Allen. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Hughh Jackmann, Woody Allen, Iann McShanne.
Not to be confused with Scoop the novel by Evelyn Waugh (Who’s she?)… so don’t go looking for British fops stumbling worldweary and wattled along Grubb Street or wherever it is they publish their newspapers …but not bad even so (I’d give it three urfs and a barely audible urk out of four whole urfs, an urf being made up of three urks …when they’re audible). Hard to say as ever whether the schlub set on screen by Woody is supposed to be Woody. Back when he was a young schlub wisecracking at the expense of the dumb Anglo-Aryan-Midwest stud (Bananas, Sleeper, Manhattan) and snagging in the end the (dubiously… if Diane Keaton or Mia Farrow or Soon Yi is your cup of tea… be like riding Lance Armstrong’s bike over railroad ties, do you ask me. Exceptions: Mariel Hemingway and Charlotte Rampling though poor Charlotte mighta gone an exposed haunch too far in Swimming Pool) pouty lips, high cheekbones, baggy jeans (Annie Hall look and aren’t we sorry to see that one join the fides defunctae)… and way too young, way too schicksa hee-row-whine, mighta been wishful thinking, suppressed desire, every gink’s daydream. Now it’s got laughable, howsomever, so in the wake of his own real world domestic incongruosity, Woody’s had at least the good sense to play in this one a plain old vanilla asexual(maybe postsexualor better: veterosexual… urf! urf!) schlub… though he can’t seem to resist one lasssssssst (maybe the actual and finallast) poke at the whitebread guyguys the little man with the big nose and ugly glasses and red hair would perhaps have liked to be (and apparently tried early on to be… not many people know that Woody was a Golden Gloves boxer; went to Andover; discovered radium; was the Johnny who knelt beside Wolfe at Quebec. You can look it up).
That said, Scoop is light and fast and clever, the which reflects, I suppose, Woody’s beginnings writing stand-up monologues, stage skits, zingers and one-liners of the Borscht Belt persuasion, some of them a little tired, alas: “If we put our heads together, you’ll hear a hollow sound,” announcesSondra Pransky as registered by Johansson, of whom a bewildering succession of messy college-girl outfits each one sloppier and yet baggier than the one before cannot hide the sumptuous and paralyzing beauty—woof!—and who though Midwestern is evidently somehow intended a hustling—if not too bright—princess whom Woody constantly refers to as “Mandelbaum.” Some kinda arcane New Yawk urban sow-fist-i-cate twiddle there shot right over me (small mercy), but that’s the game here: we’re in London but we’re dumbo Americans who amuse by our gaucherie (French for: “Start with the fork on the outside, Marie-Sophie!”) and charm by our naiveté (French for: “Head empty, jeans filled”) the staid Brits posing on their despicably familial estates, wallowing down the wrong side of the road in their despicably rolls Royces, swallowing up in their despicably occlusive overbites those undersyllables. Still, there’s funny stuff as Woody does his stuttering, shuddering, futzing schlemozzel, impelled in the dark moment to do the right—and the brave—thing, eternal affirmation of the nobility of the schlep and flickering hope for all us imperfect and imperfectible souls like him.
Goes like this: Sondra (Johansson), a “journalism major” from Iowa (or worse) and on a visit to London, stumbles across the low-rent Music Hall magic act of senescent vaudevillian, the Great Splendini, actually Sidd Watermann (Woody), in whose mystic cabinet she meets the ghost of departed hustler journalist Joe Strombel (McShanne, who looks these days—aptly enough for the part—like Death eating a sammich… Ouch!). Strombel’s shade advises her that the Serial Killer now stalking slim, short-haired, brunette prostitutes is none other than Lord Chesterfield’s (or something) own young scion, the Earl Viscount Thane of Cawdor (pronounced “Cghhg”), Hughh Jackmann, the guyguy who invented whitebread, for Pete’s sake. Well, with one thing and another, Sondra leaps at the chance of—wait for it…wait for it—a scoop, in pursuit of which she enlists the reticent and mumblesome Sidd. As the two wannabes (well, one wannabe and one doanwannabe) stalk in their turn the young, rich, handsome Marquiss (variously pronounced) of Blenheim (“Blghm” in British), clues pile up to suggest that he is the Serial Killer: his Mom is slim, short-haired, brunette, and promiscuous. But how can this be? He’s young, rich, handsome. Symmetry alone would pair him up with the young, penniless, nubile (transparently so despite the granny glasses and GP tent wardrobe… [Footsienote here: Some halfway through the story—though perhaps not shot in sequence—Scarlett fetches up with about forty pounds extra, just as transparently swathed in a ballooning towel… mid-film pregnancy? …bulimia? …bovine un-cephalitis? Sheesh! Miss one lousy segment of Entertainment Tonight and the world pass you by) Sondra. Could this puzzle possible fetch up with a happy ending? Or will Woody’s longtime obsession with Death resurface to haunt our neuroses (with his)?
Well, the ending is—if predictable—a surprise. And Woody does do it again. Cinee-mah lite, but seasoned, but saucy with bankable high rollers (and young rollers …and nubile rollers) whom it amuses even to play stiffs for America’s last hope for another Chaplin.