Presence

I was never a fan of Woody Allen; as a kid, a few brief glimpses on cable of Allen dressed as some sort of sex-crazed, low-budget robot butler and the whole Soon Yi incident were about all I had to work with, leaving me uninterested in his art. In the past few weeks, I've watched, and loved, both of his recent films, which makes me want to go back and see him in his prime (Annie Hall and Manhattan are now both in my Netflix queue).

Last night I watched Scoop, Allen's follow-up to Match Point. While Match Point is a tragedy of sorts, Scoop is definetly a comedy. Beyond the hilarious one liners delivered by both Allen and Johansson (when Scarlett Johannson's character Sondra Pransky tells Allen she is falling in love with suspected murderer Hugh Jackman, Allen asks, "You come from an Orthodox family, would they accept a serial killer?"), the film is really about Being versus Becoming.

Scoop opens with Ian McShane's character, a recently deceased journalist who in life never stopped seeking for the next big story, on his way across the River Styx to the eternal, unchanging lands, when he stumbles across information that could have given him the biggest scoop of his former life. McShane cheats death to bring the information to Johansson, a young journalism student who is short on experience but long on determination, sensing in her a familar drive to uncover the truth. Through a strange series of events, Johansson ends up forming a detective tag team with Allen's Sidney Waterman, also known as Splendini, an aging stage magician who seems trapped in the Vaudeville era. As the film progresses Allen's septegenarion curmudgeon begins to come alive again, reinvigorated by his youthful companians enthusiams. In the mean time, Johansson begins to fall for the would-be criminal, and slacks off the investigation, prefering instead to maintain the status-quo of her new found romance. All the characters are transitioning from a state of Being to Becoming, from the passive to the active, or vice versa.

I find it somewhat interesting that Allen chose Johansson for this project, having just worked with her on Match Point. Just as the aging Splendini is reinvigorated by the youthful enthusiasm imparted by Sondra, Allen's real-life film-making activities seem similarly reanimated by his collaboration with Ms. Johansson. The film shows the power of love to cause one to both invigorate and stagnate, depending on the circumstances.