If you are an Allen fan, you have probably already seen Scoop, but for those who are not, think of his movies like successive chapters in comic wonder (or blunder) released annually for your entertainment. Allen is a storyteller and comedian constantly in flux, and has released a film almost every year since 1966 to prove it. Almost 30 years after the acclaim of what might be his most famous film, Annie Hall his neurotic humor is revived in this caper which is set entirely in London, and adorned with lines like, "I don't need to work out. My anxiety acts as aerobics." Even beyond the borders of the 5 boroughs and across the pond his absurdist humor still amuses while he takes us on a walking tour of London and the English countryside.
English-speaking Britain is a foreign land compared to his native New York, a place he could never reside, he says, because of the "language problem." Allen is 'The Great Splendini,' or Sid Waterman when the magician's cape is off. Cards shoot from a top hat, a bouquet of cheap fabric flowers explode from his palm. There is one trick, not up his sleeve, but in his "dematerializer" booth, which Ms. Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson) enters and meets the ghost of a persistent investigative journalist, Joe Strombel (Ian McShane). Strombel has learned that society man Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is London's notorious "Tarot Card Killer." He pursues the story from the grave in the only way he can, through Sondra, who follows the scoop with Sid disguised as her father, the requisite dysfunctional relationship in any Allen film, that surprises us with comic chemistry unmatched since the days of Annie (Diane Keaton) and Alvy (Allen) in the aforementioned Annie Hall
The movie's characters play their own kinds of tricks on one another, Sondra pretends her name is Jade, and that Sid is her father (and vice-versa for Sid). Likewise, Peter keeps his fingers deceptively crossed behind his back when he tells Jade how sensual she is and hints at love at first sight. None of the characters are who they say they are, their relationships are based on false identities. Their deceptions are bound to catch up with them, but watching Sid and Sondra riff on one another's idiosyncrasies is half the fun of the story. Take the scene with the pair's impromptu plan for Sondra to stage her own drowning in the private pool where Peter takes laps. For Sondra the introduction is embarrassing enough, but the scene doesn't crescendo until Sid re-enters the pool area, stumbling over his phony reaction to the near tragedy, I was in the lounge, I heard you drowning. I finished my tea and scones and came immediately!
There is a real energy between Allen and Johansson that makes it fun to watch a Woody Allen comedy again. The director is in his 70s now so it is unlikely that audiences have much more than a decade left to enjoy his antics. My hope is that his Allen has come full-circle. Hopefully Scoop is a happy hint of what lies ahead in the conclusion of his career, his witty pleasure and liveliness that's now forty-years-old. |
Scoop 
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