Scoop

This Woody Allen/Scarlett Johansson team-up comedy/crime thriller comes between Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona.  The two star as an unlikely pair of amateur detectives.  Allen plays a stage magician, and while inside his “disappearing man” box during a performance, Johansson comes face to face with a ghost.  The ghost (played by Ian McShane) is a deceased newspaper reporter who, receiving a hot tip on a serial killer case while chatting with other dead people in the afterlife, tries to channel himself back into the world of the living to any reporter he can come across and pass on the juicy lead.  It just so happens ScarJo’s character is a fumbling writer for her college newspaper.  And so begins a series of deception and coincidences as the characters exchange rapid, funny dialogue while investigating Hugh Jackman.  (Note, also in the same year Johansson and Jackman starred together in another magic and mystery movie, The Prestige.)

A Woody Allen mystery movie is like Kevin Smith crossed with M. Night Shyamalan.  You get expansive lengths of funny, character-tinged dialogue and a twist at the end explained briefly by an incidental character who the leads met earlier in the film.  I won’t bother trying to sell you on it, you either love it or hate it.

What I really want to mention is Scarlett Johansson’s perfomance.  She begins by really playing off-type from the roles she’s known for.  Instead of a smoky-voiced femme fatale, she plays a very young, naive, but still headstrong girl.  Who is always conservatively dressed, even post-coitus.  She knows what she wants, but is not sure how to achieve it.  Despite that, she still tries, clumsily, anything she can to pursue the story.  She begins with some uncertain, stuttering vocal quirks when she’s first trying to make up her cover story, but that goes away as the film progresses.  It seems as if as she became less confident that of the guilt of her investigative mark, she became more confident as a woman.  It was a bit of a confusing switch for me, and I’m not convinced it was intentional.  For me, it feels like the character’s interesting quirks that first hooked me just disappear halfway through the movie.  Still, I liked seeing a different side of her, rather than the increasingly played out focus on sexuality or whiny neediness.

Recommended (for Woody Allen’s conversations).