Scoop (2006)

There is a moment in Scoop when a dead journalist climbs aboard a barge bound for the afterlife and promptly begins complaining about his editor. This is the film's entire moral universe, and it is a small one. Woody Allen's 2006 romantic crime comedy concerns Sondra Pransky, an American journalism student who impersonates a wealthy heiress to investigate whether a British aristocrat might be the Tarot Card Killer. Scarlett Johansson plays her with a pleasant blankness. Hugh Jackman plays the aristocrat with a jaw. Allen plays a magician named Splendini and delivers the jokes he has been delivering since the Carter administration.

On the matter of social consciousness, the cupboard is bare. The cast is uniformly white and Anglo, and the film has no interest in saying anything about that or about anything else. Sondra is nominally ambitious, a young woman chasing a byline, but the screenplay promptly converts her into a lovestruck ingénue undone by a handsome lord with a lake. No feminist reading survives contact with the third act, in which she is thrown into the water for knowing too much. The wealthy villain is wealthy because villains in drawing-room mysteries are wealthy. Nobody eats anything except lunch.

There is no climate anxiety here, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority, no renegotiation of the historical record. Race does not appear as a subject, a tension, or a thought. The film's only sermon is delivered by a ghost, and it concerns the importance of a good scoop. What remains is a light farce about murder, which is a strange thing to be light about and a familiar thing for this director to be. It is not offensive. It is not much of anything. We classify it, we file it, we move on to the next.