Dispirited

And yet, with the exception of The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen makes no effort to ensure that the magical events in his movies seem or feel even remotely magical. The image of the ghost appearing and disappearing in Scoop wouldn’t have impressed a farmer watching his first two-reeler on a Nickelodeon in 1913. What’s more, his characters either barely react when the supernatural invades their lives, or they respond with grumpy peevishness.

In Scoop, the ghost manifests himself before a would-be young journalist in London played by Scarlett Johansson and tells her that a prominent man-about-town is a serial killer. She is shocked by that news, but seems hardly intrigued by the fact that she has communed with the spirit world. That goes double for the magician on whose stage she has met the ghost. The magician, played by Allen, is standing right there when the ghost appears for the second time, and ten minutes later he’s whining that he’s tired and would rather be eating lunch.

Scoop has a diverting premise out of a Bob Hope movie from half a century ago–the 20-year-old daughter of a Brooklyn dental hygienist and a peevish old prestidigitator posing as father and daughter to solve a crime–but like most of Allen’s slapdash comic work in the past two decades, it’s the cinematic equivalent of an egg so hastily cooked it doesn’t even come out soft-boiled. It’s as though Allen gets a funny idea, spends a few weeks jotting it down on yellow legal pads, gets his sister to raise $15 million from Europeans, hires a very good cast hopeful that he might write one of them a part that will secure an Oscar (or at least a nomination), and then goes off and spends 10 weeks making it–without actually bothering to put his work through a second draft.

Allen does try something new by setting up a loving-bickering dynamic between his character and Johansson’s in which she calls him an idiot while he tells people she has learning disabilities. I gather this is based on the real-life banter between Allen and Johansson, who served him so well as the desperate girlfriend in last year’s surprisingly good melodrama, Match Point. But satisfying though it might be to see a young female character in an Allen movie treat Allen himself with disgust rather than adoration, it’s never in the least amusing. Nor is Allen’s groaningly old bit as a hapless American who tries to get in with the British upper class by talking stupidly about tea, crumpets, and fox hunts.

The more interesting question raised by the entirely forgettable Scoop is this: Why does Allen bother with the supernatural if he is not going to place it at the center of his tale–or if he isn’t trying to make a point about how there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy? Allen is, by his own admission, a skeptic, an atheist, even a nihilist. In his movies, the universe is a directionless place. Killers tend to get away with their murders. Adulterers end their affairs without consequence and go back to their wives if they so choose. Love fades. Whether a life is tragic or comic simply depends on how you look at it.

It doesn’t take a therapist to see Allen’s bleak worldview is simply a means for him to excuse his own appalling behavior–taking pornographic pictures and engaging in sexual relations with the teenage daughter of his girlfriend, the same girl who was sister to his own two children. Nor does it take a therapist to see that his longing for magic and the supernatural represents a desperate desire to find something, anything, transcendent to believe in–in his case, the cheapest, easiest, and least meaningful form of transcendence there is.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.