"Scoop" starts much like Woody Allen's recent movies -- a group of friends sits around a table, drinking and pondering a problem. In this case, it's a dead reporter named Joe Strombel (Ian McShane), whose utter ruthlessness and colossal ego as a reporter now (post-mortem) appear both brilliant and lunatic. His colleagues toast his memory, amazed at his nerve but not exactly touched by his sudden death.
The film takes the question of what happens after death a step beyond survivors' chatter when it cuts to Joe afloat on Death's boat (this would be the Bergman reference, as Death wears a hooded cloak and carries a scythe). For a moment, it looks as if "Scoop" might be something relatively new for Woody Allen, considering a man's anxiety about death without involving a nubile or dead young woman.
But no. It is precisely that. For as Joe wanders over the deck, he meets a dead young woman whose story becomes the germ of his last scoop. She believes her former employer killed her, and further, that he is the Tarot Card Killer who has been terrorizing young women in London.
Joe's utter ruthlessness and ego kick in, and soon he's found his way back to the world of the living, specifically, a theater stage, where a magician, the Great Splendini (Allen), also known as Sid, is performing shtick ("You're a credit to your race," he tells his audience, "And I say that from the bottom of my heart").
Sid finds a pretty girl to agree to be "dematerialized," and she happens to be an American journalism student, Sondra (Scarlett Johansson), already feeling uneasy because she's had mirthless, drunken sex with a self-loving film director. "I slept with him and I didn't even get the interview," she complains, though she also seems to believe her most effective journalistic asset is her body.
On stage, Sid shuts her up inside a magic box, where she's supposed to "disappear," but instead, encounters the slightly disoriented but still self-involved Joe. Thus the pretty girl, within just 10 minutes on screen, confronts a raft of older men who use her for their own, obvious purposes (Splendini has asked for a volunteer "willing to put her life on the line"). While Sondra takes all this attention mostly in stride, even deciding that she must pursue Joe's clue in order to further her professional career, the movie can't just grant her agency and send her on her way.
Instead, it subjects her to any number of indignities, including irritating advice and help on the case from the entirely annoying Sid, who gets his own glimpse of the specter Joe. When he begins to fret, the intrepid Sondra tries to soothe him: "Think about this as adding some excitement to your life," she says, even as you know this is the last thing a Woody Allen character wants to do.
The ghost sets Sondra (and so, Sid) after the suspect, a British aristocrat named Peter (Hugh Jackman), who she attracts by pretending to drown in a swimming pool. Looking near to death, it seems, makes her attractive, as Peter immediately invites her to his home for a hoity-toity lawn party. Again, she seems unable to give her next step in the investigation much thought, as she poses as a rich girl from the states (with Sid as her father), and promptly falls in love with Peter (who wins her over with such odious dialogue as "I jut love an American accent" and "You have a very sensual quality").
This inspires Sid's jealousy, as he takes up his paternal role with some clunky gusto, offering to protect and guide her. When he warns that she shouldn't be pretending to be someone else -- namely, "Jade Spence" -- in order to solve the case and get her scoop, she observes dryly, "Your whole life is a deception. You're a magician."
This sounds like a theme. And if "Scoop" has one, pressed down beneath its poor plotting, awkward editing, and reductive characterizations, the emotional and moral costs of deception might be it. While Sondra maintains her cover even as she's sneaking into Peter's secret locked room to search for clues, she begins to distrust herself. Maybe if she's lying, she can't see truth anymore. Maybe his weird twitch when discussing his "unfaithful" mother doesn't mean Peter is the killer. Or maybe the deck of tarot cards she discovers doesn't mean what she thinks it means.
Sid, of course, reads every whiff of evidence as a full-on reason to condemn Peter. "What are you putting in your Metamucil?" wonders Sondra as Sid tells her to beware. It's the film's meanest line, not quite clever, but instead framing worries about aging and death in a way that the murders of young women don't quite.
This would be another theme, death. As unsubtle in its presentation here as deception, it overlaps in the figure of Joe, master liar and beguiler, inspiration for both Sid and Sondra, crossing metaphysical boundaries to pursue a truth that means nothing to him except as it affects his reputation, his "scoop." Angry at her resistance to his version of the truth, Sid points out, "Even a great reporter can be wrong." The "reporter" here might embody transcendent art, impending death, or abject insensitivity. In any case, Sondra's ambition looks bleak. "Scoop" rates as a 4 out of 10.
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