By Armond White

Scoop

Directed by Woody Allen 

A Canturbury Tale 

Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburer 

Why doesn’t Woody Allen just quit? He craps out movies (six already this millennium) as if Vincent Canby were still at the Times dictating New York’s cultural taste. It’s hard to deny that Allen’s artistic stature owes less to skill or vision than to his cemented media caché—all the ineptitude that’s fit to praise. This hometown boy phenomenon is made clear by Allen’s recent fish-out-of-water relocation to England for Match Point, a vile drama, and his not-so-different, lamentable new comedy, Scoop. Outside Manhattan, Woody’s movies have no justification.

Allen’s change of venue lacks the artistry you expect from a traveling filmmaker—whether Antonioni in Death Valley, Louis Malle in Atlantic City, Jacques Demy in Los Angeles, Whit Stillman in Barcelona or, to cite Allen’s hero, Bob Hope in Morocco, Zanzibar, Singapore, Bali or Rio. The new scenery only superficially disguises Allen’s stagnating creativity. Scoop reprocesses Mighty Aphrodite and Manhattan Murder Mystery but omits a genuine sense of place. 

This is a major failure in light of Powell-Pressburger’s atmospheric masterpiece A Canturbury Tale (1944), just now luminously restored by Criterion DVD. In this existential mystery, an American G.I., Bob Johnson (John Sweet), finds himself lost in historic, provincial Kent—a model of American sensibility interacting with British land and culture. Powell-Pressburger’s purpose, conveying an astonished sense of place, exposes Allen’s inability to respond artistically to his new locale. 

Changing place does not change personality. Scoop actually takes place in Allen’s mean little head. As in Match Point, England superficially substitutes for Manhattan’s Upper East Side; London’s chic Mayfair shops seem more important than how local characters represent their milieu and customs. In A Canturbury Tale Powell-Pressburger delights in nature and custom, providing shocks of discovery and sunlit revelations of climate and tradition. (John Sweet is told “Canturbury Cathedral is right behind the movie theater. You can’t miss it.”) Such sensitivity helps make movies art, but Allen’s too-familiar conceits in Scoop don’t suffice.

Worse, Allen vents his shameless misogyny: Scarlett Johansson plays a fetching yet stupid American college student who teams with Allen (playing a nightclub magician) to track down London’s modern day Jack the Ripper (Hugh Jackman). In other words, Scoop flips Match Point’s homicidal smugness into a comedy about a serial killer. Even England’s shadowy cultural heritage is ignored for what feels like Allen’s personal vengeful subtext. In A Canturbury Tale John Sweet tests his Yankee certitude against the skepticism and faithfulness of assorted Britons—especially when a mysterious rascal dumps glue on women’s heads as a parochial, jingoistic prank. But Allen doesn’t test himself against Jack the Ripper or glue-dumping legend; he merely adds to it. (Recall Allen’s grim taste for showing women as neurotic, pathetic, repulsive: Mira Sorvino’s hooker in Mighty Aphrodite was one of the most hideous female characterizations of recent years, Dianne Weist’s regressive drag act in Bullets Over Broadway, another.) 

After killing off Johansson in Match Point, Allen brings her back for this absurd debauch. In addition to amateur journalist, she plays a gullible, cynical slut. Although Johannson shows girlish adoration toward Master Woody, it’s not reciprocated with adult rapport like Allen had with Diane Keaton in Manhattan Murder Mystery. In Allen’s movies Keaton’s talent and charm made her unkillable (despite always being cast as ditzes). Allen dulls Johansson’s usual glow. In her final, crime-solving scene, Johansson appears limp and soaking wet—her fealty reduced to the bedraggled desperation of a nearly drowned puppy. To humiliate Johansson any further, Allen would have to coarsen A Canturbury Tale and literally take a dump on her.