Movie break: Woody makes hay in England: Scoop (2006) and Cassandra’s Dream (2007-08), Part 1 of 3

Fifth in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop (and political) culture

Also fits this series:

“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films

Subsections below:

I. A comedy/mystery lark, good for Woody fans: Scoop (2006)

Where it stands in the critical scheme of things

A quick sum of the film’s plot—as cluttered as a magician’s steamer trunk? Or as fulsome as a colorful stage show?
Allen’s view of the film is slightly disappointed—while his performance actually has problems, but not that can’t be overlooked
The element of Jewish jokes: One example, to tease out the point

[Edits 8/29/14, including replaced quote between asterisks. Edit 9/4/14. Part 2 is here.]

Match Point (2005) (see my review here) opened a big, new door for Woody Allen on a few levels. Whenever he first knew of the big box-office success of MP, he definitely was able to get several films made from summer 2004 (when MP was produced) through summer 2007 (production for Vicky Cristina Barcelona), and three of the four films made were under the British producing umbrella of at least one figure, Gareth Wiley. Definitely by February 2006, as we see in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007), p. 185, Allen saw that with his financing coming from European sources, and with the success of MP, the expectation was of his doing good work, not necessarily a pandering comedy.

Aside from issues of business success, the framework of producers he had tells some of the longer-range story: if you look at the on-screen credits for the three films made in Britain, the constellation of individual producers piece out this way, with—on Allen’s side—Helen Robin being on one level and his sister Letty Aronson on another (whatever these levels mean):

MP: [Robin level] Nicky Kentish Barnes; [Aronson level] Gareth Wiley and Lucy Darwin. Scoop: [Robin] Barnes; [Aronson] Wiley. Cassandra’s Dream: [Robin] Barnes; [Aronson] Wiley. An interesting aspect of the third film is that it also received French production support that seems to have been a sine qua non of its being done (we’ll get to this in Part 2). (Both MP and Scoop were partly produced by BBC Films, while the third wasn’t.)

Despite his having seemingly expanded leeway to do what he wanted, Allen would quickly conclude that Scoop was a bit of a waste of time, but this opinion, we’ll find, isn’t universal.

The fact that Scoop was filmed in England, with some of the same production people as with Match Point (2005)—among them, Scarlett Johansson for acting, and Remi Adefarasin for cinematography, with his supple pans and dollyings—gives this film a sense of a “breath of fresh air” in terms of environment, articulate actors, a historical-and-yet-high-tech urban setting, and droll culture-clash moments. This all mixes well with its air of light comedy, after the heavy drama of MP. (Leonard Maltin’s characterizing Scoop as an “afterpiece” of MP turns out to be only in some narrow story-element commonalities; regarding theme and tone, the pictures are quite different, but they are bracing complements like very different items in a foreign dinner.)

I. A comedy/mystery lark, good for Woody fans: Scoop (2006)

Quick assessment: Good for Allen fans; not-bad choice for the casually interested; probably a bore for anti-Allen viewers.

Where it stands in the critical scheme of things

Scoop, as we find from Lax, pp. 43-44, was cobbled together from a few slim ideas Allen had had floating around, and the film, as you first watch it, seems like a pastiche of Allen-type themes and tropes. It’s also helpful to quote the Videohound review at length (and I insert boldfaced numbers at points regarding which I want to comment):

[rating is “two bones” out of four, or the equivalent of two stars out of four] Allen’s 35^th directorial feature is evidence he should ease up on that yearly quota. This time the kvetching [1] centers around a naïve journalism student ([Scarlett] Johansson) who is given the scoop of a lifetime by the ghost of a muckraking journalist ([Ian] McShane), and must investigate with the help of a third-rate magician (Allen) on whose stage the ghost appeared. Feels like a patchwork collection of past Allen flicks [2] with nothing new or interesting, including the requisite abundance of self-centered Judaic jokes [3]. [Videohound’s Golden Movie Retriever, 2011 edition (Gale, Cencage Learning, 2010), p. 892]

If you’ve gotten as far with me in my Allen reviews as here, you know that Allen’s best years are behind him. The question then becomes, what also-ran of his do we want to see, with healthily reduced expectations? I think the fact that movie audiences, regarding Allen, are divided into pro-Allen, anti-Allen, and casually-interested means that we have to start classifying how we recommend films of the foregoing decade by these three categories. Pro-Allen viewers will like this film; the casually interested may take or leave it (but should give it a chance); and the anti-, of course, would go right along with Videohound.

I would respectfully differ with a few of Videohound’s terms above; it seems the reviewer is an Allen skeptic, and I’m willing to live and let live on assessments, but here I would diverge with, among other things, [1] the issue of “kvetching.” You don’t get a lot of “Allen’s character as complainer” here—or the extent to which you do can, or may not, be entertaining, and it is not central to the film’s story (or appeal).

On other debatable points in the Videohound review: [2] Flicks is a weird word to use here; better is tropes, themes, or ideas. (And even there, though this film has a familiar Allen flavor in what it has of cobbled-together ideas, Scoop doesn’t seem too derivative in wholesale-ish ways from past films of his.) When reviewers get this careless with wording, they undercut the credibility of their review which might otherwise be pretty much worth heeding.

[3] The issue of Jewish jokes is interesting, and I will come back to this. Allen’s character Sidney Waterman, a sort of traveling magician with the stage name Splendini, engages occasionally in some Jewish jokes as he employs Allen’s characters’ frequent one-liner style. Overall, these jokes don’t bother me. One is even worth analyzing in some detail. Whether the reviewer calls these jokes “self-centered” because of Allen’s seeming to making references to Jews in a way that the reviewer considers invidiously self (Allen)-serving, or whether the implication is that Allen is merely “being too Jewish-oriented” for average American tastes, is hard to say; I would say the second interpretation isn’t really valid—though whether people out West or down South would not really “get into” Jewish jokes is a potential audience-appeal issue—something that’s more the central concern of marketers—that can be seen regarding all sorts of jokes, and reflects nothing more than that people have a widely varied set of tastes and sensibilities to which they’re entitled.

As for the first interpretation—“Allen is being selfish” in his jokes about Jews: I think this may depend on the Jew (as Allen might say), but to me, what he says that is “meta-Jewish” isn’t terribly provocative—not to me, and I say this as a Gentile who has had long exposure to Jewish jokes both from interpersonal situations and from literary works. When I turn to a specific example of his joking here, I will look at this issue further and explain my position.

A quick sum of the film’s plot—as cluttered as a magician’s steamer trunk? Or as fulsome as a colorful stage show?

The story is about a young woman, Sondra Pransky (Johansson), who was originally interested in studying dental hygienics (there turns out to be a number of dental motifs running through the film), taking a turn at doing journalism work as a new journalism student. She tries to interview a famous film director, and ends up being taken to bed by him (after he’s plied her with drinks) one night. Allen employs what he admits in at least Mighty Aphrodite (1995) as a deus ex machina, in his case a sort of abrupt plot move to iron out a story, by (here) having the ghost of Joe Strombel (Ian McShane), an esteemed, just-deceased British reporter (whose funeral is an opening scene in the film), appear to Pransky when she has been roped into participating in a magic trick conducted by Splendini, a sort of Catskills relic who, for unclear reasons, is plying his trade on a British stage. In the old magician’s box where you put a person in, close the door and wait a minute, and re-open the door and the person is gone, Pransky unexpectedly has Strombel appear to her with a “big” tip about the Tarot-card killer, a serial killer that has been active recently in Britain.

This initial setup may sound so hokey and synthetic, as if only the most ardent Allen fans would continue watching (End note), but a number of Allen films could have rather dry setup or initial-building to the plot, and get better as they go on. This film actually gets to be solid fun once the true mystery is put into action.

She goes home, and researches Strombel and the Tarot card killer. She goes back to Splendini and consults with him about his magic box and the fact that she saw Joe Strombel…. She wants to go back in the box for a try at a follow-up consult with Strombel. Splendini, of course, is skeptical in trademark Allen fashion.

Long story short, Strombel’s ghost appears outside the box to both Splendini and Pransky, and Splendini becomes a believer, too. Then the two are ad hoc partners in looking into the mystery, but then the stumbling block is that the identity of the Tarot-card killer may be a young rich man, Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) who is son of a Lord, raising various questions with social and legal implications….

Eventually Pransky—who is helped by her roommate, British blonde Vivian (Romola Garai), to get into a men’s club that Lyman frequents—gets to speak to (and win the confidence of) Lyman, faking her being unable to swim in a pool. (Splendini is with her, gamely posing as her father.) In the process, she makes up a new name, Jade Julia Spence, a sort of socialite with friends in Britain, with her father (Splendini) accordingly designated as a rich businessman. Lyman invites her to visit at his estate.

##

The plot gets more coherent and gripping as “Jade”/Sondra pursues her work as a budding journalist, trying to find out if Lyman is the Tarot-card killer, with Splendini “as her father” having to be won over to various of her latest theories and such. The two actually vary through the film as to whether they believe Lyman is the killer, and what is appropriate to do next. This film seems to layer on a lot of “stage tricks”: for one thing, there are the layers of identities—Lyman suspected of being someone else; Sondra Pransky faking an identity as an investigating reporter insinuating her way into Lyman’s life; and Splendini—actually, Sidney Waterman—with both stage name and faked name to help Sondra. And the plot seems to vary with how hot the two respectively are in their pursuit of the killer.

This may all seem like a lot to have to swallow, but I found I could watch the film several times, and was rewarded with untangling the complexity as I saw it again. It turns out that Lyman didn’t kill all the women that the Tarot-card killer is alleged to have, but does kill one woman, and, by way of leaving a “telltale” prop, “folds” this into the Tarot-card killer’s rap sheet of deaths. (Allen says in Lax [p. 43] that he combined, in Scoop, (1) the plot element of a murderer “hiding” a murder in the series of another, serial murderer’s work, with (2) the element of a reporter being so eager to deliver a scoop that he comes back from the dead to give it to a living reporter.)

I won’t reveal everything, but I think I help you untangle some of this film’s complexity. The fact that it’s presented as a fun comedy also makes it “go down” more easily.  And the fact that Allen pushes for comic effect even has him giving Johansson a close-up shot, as Internet-digging student on the computer, scrunching up her face awkwardly, with nerdy eyeglasses and dental retainer on her teeth she moves restlessly with her tongue. This varies her starkly from the smooth temptress Nola Rice of MP.

(By the way, if one should take issue with Allen/Splendini’s jokes, a few are as old—in form—as George Burns was when he died: at one point, being shown around the Lyman estate, Splendini remarks on how it reminds him of “Trollope,” it sounds like; Lyman asks, the author? “No, not the author, this was a girl I knew,” or such. Later, at a smoker/card game in a men’s club, Splendini remarks on once having won enough money to buy a “Rubens,” it sounds like, Lord Lyman remarks with admiration, “You bought a Rubens painting?” Splendini: “No, a Reuben sandwich.”)

Allen’s view of the film is slightly disappointed—while his performance actually has problems, but not that can’t be overlooked

Allen himself developed a rather skeptical opinion about Scoop: “[T]he only thing I have against Scoop is a self-indulgent lack of ambition. […] I think that the movie’s cute—that the jokes are funny, that everyone performs well, …  But it’s not ambitious enough. I wanted to do a comedy and enjoy myself and make Scarlett funny and tell some jokes myself, … and what I wound up with at the end is…a light comedy, a dessert” (Lax, p. 261; said in spring 2005, apparently said very shortly after producing Scoop]

I would say that the film is about what he indicates, a light comedy in his style, including him as a character telling jokes. I think many Allen fans and semi-fans won’t mind it for these aspects, and may like it. It is definitely not first-rate among his comedies, but is all the more appealing, coming in the period it does, for being a comedy.

Actually, I think the worst feature of this film—aside from the fact that it sometimes seems a bit cluttered with story details, reflected in comments made by various characters—actually comprises occasional lapses in Allen’s performance. This is, indeed, the first Allen film since Anything Else (2003) in which he plays a character, and here, as in Hollywood Ending (2002) and Anything Else, we see the phenomenon of Allen’s performance being liable to be a self-parody at times. Actually, I think this is largely a matter of his being aged—here, he seems a bit jowly, with a bit of the more dignified bearing of an elderly person, and his hair is definitely starting to turn white. But those familiar with him will be enamored enough of his actually taking another acting turn, and follow his shtick readily enough, that his fans will indulge him here.

Allen says in Lax in a few places (usually in 2005 and 2006) that his doing his typical character is something he is less apt to allow into his screenplays. (This may or may not parallel, or be influenced by, the fact that his own performances can lack something sometimes.) “I really dislike the experience of having to make sure if I’m in it [a film] that there is a Woody Allen character” (p. 184; said in 2005 or so). His admittedly being limited in range obviously narrowly defines the kind of character he will play: “That’s the beauty of having no [acting] talent. I stay within my small range” (p. 150). Meanwhile, since he is the screenwriter, he can deliver lines while only approximating what may have been in the script; he has no trouble making up dialogue, he says (pp. 167-68). His preference, moreover, has grown toward doing more serious dramas (as will be clear when we review Cassandra’s Dream). * “I always find comedy wonderful and I always enjoy doing it and I always enjoy writing it. But I have a personal preference and put a greater value on a successful dramatic piece than on a successful comedy piece”* (p. 104).

Further, when he fumbles in his performances—and I say this while admitting that when he’s “on” even in Scoop, he still is fun to watch—we feel that we’ll be content if in the future he delivers films without appearing in them anymore. I think that starting in about 2001, after years of service we can thank him for and be satisfied with, his performances are apt to contain him having, in certain shots, a more braying/husky or oddly nasal, or baritone-ish, way of talking that seems to mock how he speaks at his best, or a way of “seeming unable to get out of his own way.” In Hollywood Ending, this degraded way of speaking sometimes is downright annoying; and to me, it does a lot to hurt Hollywood, which isn’t any great shakes on other counts anyway. In Anything Else (whose production was in 2002, when Allen was 66), his odd vocal qualities, which usually seem to occur outdoors (where his voice needs to carry), are a little troubling, but they may go along with—“be covered by”—the fact his character is supposed to be a bit of a nut.

But in Scoop (he was almost 70 when he made this), his vocal lapses—which, again, usually happen outdoors, and in nearly all cases seem apt to happen when his character is among a three-or-more-person set including British upper-crust types (and he is meant to be an also-ran American magician anyway)—are such that we have to be sympathetic to Allen as the decades-long film auteur/writer and predictable-style performer. Sometimes when he speaks, especially in a garden party scene in Scoop, you almost don’t understand him at all. I mean, I can if I work at it, and I’m long familiar with him. (Today’s young, perfect-teeth American Kaleighs and Jareds would be quite put off.)

In one scene at the garden party, he is doing shtick as magician Splendini, where he employs some of his pandering patter (“God bless you, darling!” or such, etc.) that he used a lot in Broadway Danny Rose (1984); and he flips out a one-liner that, content-wise, is slightly weak, and the not-young British man playing Peter Lyman’s father seems to genuinely strain to understand him. You feel a little bad for Allen, if you understand Allen’s type of spiel. The U.S. and the Brits are, as Winston Churchill famously said, separated by a common language; and nowhere does this become more evident than when strong regional accents on either side are in play. Allen, for us Americans, might seem increasingly “old Brooklyn” in his talk, so we can imagine an elderly Briton—who is used to G and T’s in a local paneled-wall men’s club and proper, dry-toned enunciation of the Queen’s English—might wonder what kind of murky mess this old kibitzer is making of English.

In other words, seeing him do shtick with a constellation of Brits, which is supposed to be funny, and finding him almost too hard to follow at times, is like seeing Old Uncle Gustafsson engage in his time-tested type of dinner-table patter, and yet hearing him sound a bit like a stroke victim, but with us warmly indulging him nonetheless, and hoping that people not too familiar with him aren’t too put off by him.

On the other hand, when Allen is with his main player Johansson, or with individual others in more “intimate” scenes, he is usually fluent and easy to follow, and the wit can catch us immediately.

The element of Jewish jokes: One example, to tease out the point

For a look at one type of the many sorts of details in this film, let’s harken to what Videohound referred to—carelessly, it would turn out on further examination—as “the requisite abundance of self-centered Judaic jokes.” “Requisite abundance”? I guess that depends on how you view Allen, as to whether you like Jewish jokes or thinks he uses too many of them throughout his films (I think, objectively speaking, the latter point isn’t really true).

But “self-centered Judaic jokes”—this raises questions. As I hinted before, selfish on whose part? Does the reviewer not like to hear (so many) Jewish jokes? Or does Allen put a twist on them he or she doesn’t like? I think the latter is more the issue.

To speak from my own experience as a “goy” who first got exposed to the cultural phenomenon of Jewish jokes back in the late-1970s-to-early ’80s (through Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen, among others, and in the college scene for me, GWU, which included a lot of Jewish students): There is a fair and lengthy tradition of American Jewish comedians, whether at some point in their career they aspire to write more culturally ambitious literature or not, joking on Jewish culture. This seems to reflect, at least in part, two things: (1) a sort of self-embarrassment at the rich but provincial quality of Jewish culture (and this would seem to mean traditions, ways of thinking and speaking, and so on brought to the U.S. by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants within the past 100 or so years); and (2) a will, also, slyly pursued, of trying to win Gentile America’s warm acceptance of Jews by being “self-deprecatingly joking” about same. This puts the matter in somewhat schematic terms, and nuances and complexities about this can be further addressed as I move to blog entries in the near-future that deal with more autobiographical matters.

It’s possible that in more recent years (say, since about 1995 or 2000), some American Gentiles have gotten less warm to these kinds of jokes. Maybe they seemed more “apropos” during the high-water mark of Jewish comedians’ being on the Catskills/supper-club and TV-variety-show circuits in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s (out of which Allen could be said to have sprung). (Ways that this subsection of culture seemed to condition broader American culture are floated—for one possible “reference” on this sort of thing—in the biography of writer Joseph Heller by Tracy Daugherty, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011].)

As for Allen, though he incorporated this kind of joke into a variety of his movies since the 1970s, it’s possible he’s gotten more ironic-about-Jews in his older age (but whether one could argue this is just for comedic purposes is unclear; also, the meaning of this—as to whether it’s sincere or not—would be unclear). Is this what the reviewer is taking issue with in calling the jokes “self-centered”? I think this is a tricky area to make blanket assessments in.

Myself—while I can be critical of some individual Jews’ ways of conducting themselves (not in programmatic terms, but in ethnically oriented ways), particularly regarding issues in this country (just as plenty of people might, for any of a number of reasons, and not necessarily programmatic or coldly dismissive)—I am a fond connoisseur of Jewish cultural things, many of them pop-culture-type; and I am not completely naïve about more serious Jewish traditions. I’ve worn a yarmulke at a friend’s Shabbat dinner-table one time, not that I was trying to make a special point with this, one way or the other. I’ve attended Jewish religiously related services. (It would also be a mistake to think that my experience of Jewish people—as is true for, I’m sure, many Americans—is all unitary and of the same tone. It’s safe to say they are one ethnic group regarding whom emotional reactions, especially from decades of very varied and often-rich personal experience, can run a very wide gamut.)

(In future blog entries, I will go into considerably more depth and nuance about all this area of concern. For one thing, for others to infer any sort of “typical attitude from me” based on whatever others think is my ethnic background would be to miss the mark considerably; one reason is my long-entrenched alienation I’ve had from what German ethnic identity is implied by some of my family’s background.)

And for myself, there’s nothing terribly offensive about Allen’s Jewish-related jokes in his late films.

But there is context to consider, which not everyone might get, and which if some still got, would not fully excuse the joke in their minds. (This is apart from the issue of how Allen performs his shtick, wherein he incorporates Jewish jokes, in Scoop, which to me sometimes shows an awkwardness on his part, as if he tried too few a number of takes to get his lines in, and/or maybe he didn’t feel comfortable enough spieling out his lines in the company of the “stiff” British actors.)

One example of the jokes, objectively considered: in one bit at a dock near a small lake with Allen, Johansson, and Jackman, there is talk about different ones among them playing a musical instrument, and Allen as Splendini (as “Jade’s” father) says he plays the—I’m not sure what he says, but “noose [?] harp,” which he then explains used to be called the “Jew’s harp,” but the name was changed, he said, because in the view of Jews, if there’s “the slightest hint of anti-Semitism, [then] they write letters….”

This joke doesn’t bother me much at all. For one thing, I know what a “Jew’s harp” is—I actually have one, though apparently it’s defective and doesn’t work right. It’s basically a forked or semi-ring-like instrument you clench in your teeth, and in the middle of it, attached by one end to the curved part, is a prong; and you twang this prong with your finger, and the echo of the sound in your mouth adds to the weird sort of percussive sound the instrument makes. It’s a pretty dopey folk-music instrument, basically. (Allen’s brief description of it in the film isn’t too bad.)

How this got to be called a “Jew’s harp” many years ago, I have no idea; but after a while, it became renamed a “jaw harp,” which makes some sense.

Anyway, whether the Videohound reviewer thought Allen’s jokes along the lines of the “Jew’s harp” were arrogant to his fellow Jews—or whether this wasn’t the reviewer’s beef—I thought Allen’s handling of the “Jew’s harp” thing was OK. I would not have thought it necessary to have an “arbitrary sound editing” of his line, if that was what some postproduction-related consideration might have been. (Not that Allen would have stood for this.)

End note.

In addition to Allen’s flawed performance in Scoop, the plot setup is one dimension along which this film seems best for Allen fans. But another—and I’m amused by this myself—is the likes of seeing the Grim Reaper present as a (silent) character—in fact, in scenes on a boat (heading to Hades, perhaps), with Grim looking like an obvious stage prop—and this may get even Allen’s B+-level fans rolling their eyes. But then we realize this is just a slightly self-conscious mechanism that Allen indulges in pragmatically in order to provide a plot mechanism by which the deceased British reporter, Joe Strombel, gets out of the Hades boat ride for a time to give a tip to a person in the world of the living.