Scoop
Amid news of cuts across all BBC departments, the staff of Newsnight cast about for new stories to investigate, with the unorthodox methods of Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) making few friends in the office. But when she gets an in with Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes), the Private Secretary of Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell), McAlister creates the opportunity for Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson) to get a fated sit-down with the controversial royal, to discuss his connection with Jeffrey Epstein and everything that fell out from it.
The modern day business of filmmaking often seems to be jumping the gun when it takes real-life events for the basis of dramas these days. “Too soon” is something I find myself thinking a lot when I look at the raft of upcoming releases, many of which will be “historical” dramas or what have you based on events that took place only a few years ago. The events of Scoop are really one of these, covering the famous, or rather infamous, BBS Newsnight interview of Prince Andrew, that only took place in 2019. I don’t say “Too soon” to be flippant: I mean that a proper telling of this story requires distance, so that the historical context of the event can have the opportunity to be fully examined so that the resulting fictionalisation is as complete as possible, so that it can have more of a point other than “Andrew did a bad interview”. To take this as an example, for me it is hard to look at this story outside of the context of Queen Elizabeth II’s subsequent death, the larger drama engulfing the British Royal Family throughout the last few years and the era of “fake news” that institutions like Newsnight are supposed to be a bulwark against.
Partially because of that, but also for other reasons, Scoop is a weak film for me. It’s too by-the-book in terms of exploring what happened, and its efforts at getting at the real human drama fall mostly flat. More importantly, it talks the talk in terms of apportioning guilt and blame, but it struggles with walking the walk. Billie Piper’s McAlister is our main character, the woman who does more than anyone to bring Andrew under the glaring spotlight that he deserved, and there is a certain level of engagement in watching this single-mother grasp at the story-of-a-lifetime that inadvertently falls into her lap. Director Peter Martin does his damndest to make much of the routine work of investigative journalism and interview booking into something more exciting than it is: McAlister turning up at Thirsk’s door in the dead of night to dramatically reveal the raid on Jeffrey Epstein’s home had me thinking of Jodie Foster racing around satellites in Contact in terms of needless physicality.
But there is only so far you can go with the McAlister character before you start to notice the issues, namely a degree of human wreckage that she leaves in her wake that Scoop seems strangely ambivalent about. Thirsk seems like a genuinely good person who has fond feelings for the man she has worked for for a great number of years, about her only crime: for this McAlister manipulates her into granting the interview, then is absent from the screen when the abuse starts later. Jordan Kouamé plays a POC in the Newsnight team who routinely calls McAlister out on her markedly unprofessional behaviour, and even gets a moment where he is able to confidently state that if he acted as she had then he would probably be fired, but this is treated more like an obstacle for McAlister to overcome then a deadly serious examination of racial double-standards in employment. And Andrew himself could be perceived through Scoop as something of a victim of McAlister too really, since he seems so childlike, naïve and almost simple in Sewell’s performance, a man more to be pitied than scorned at moments, totally unable to comprehend what is going on around him (a far too easy way to portray him, given what he was accused of).
In that, I think that Scoop really doesn’t do enough to get across just how bad that interview was. Instead of really getting into the nitty-gritty of Andrew’s cavalcade of attempted explanations, it zeroes in on the same strange details – a lack of sweat, Pizza Expresses, etc – that made for great memes at the time, but frankly less great journalism. Worse, with the depiction of Andrew in Scoop as an overly-coddled man-child with obvious social anxiety outside of his comfort zone (illustrated best when Scoop decided to focus on that strange teddy bear thing he has going on) this character comes out of the film having you think that he actually just might be totally harmless, caught up in a situation not of his making. It would only take a few tweaks for this production to become about rehabilitating his image, undone by cruel and uncaring journos out for a big story, and that’s a strange way for Scoop to go given the triumphal tone it strikes at its conclusion, the Newsnight team exulting over their remarkable victory…of getting Andrew to be stood down from his royal duties (but not his titles, as it incorrectly claims). His alleged victims, and the victims of everyone else involved, might be entitled to feel short-changed from such things: Scoop pays some lip service to them at the start, but that’s it, with the focus on the women who arranged/executed the interview subbing in. Andrew remains a state-sponsored celebrity in Britain today, as likely to face actual justice for his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein as Megan Markle is to be Queen.
The cast struggle a bit also. Piper’s McAlister has a quite messy character arc that the person behind the role can’t do much with, saddled with being made to look very unendearing in the first act, manipulative in the second and then sort of vanishing from the film in the third: an effort to establish her as having to overcome classism fails to land. With those aspects hamstringing her, Piper isn’t really able to make good on the character. Sewell is better as Andrew, but in line with the aforementioned problem of creating unintentional sympathy, his performance doesn’t really seem to be striking the right note. Much has been made, especially by Netflix, of Anderson’s turn as Maitlis, but the truth of the matter is that she really isn’t in enough of the film to begin with, and when she is her performance comes off more like she is doing an imitation of the presenter more than anything. The best of the lot is probably Hawes, but she too is forced to reckon with large absences rom the screen, as Scoop struggles to determine just who the main character of the film actually is.
Visually, the film is fine, competent, perhaps reflective of director’s Philip Martin’s nearly entirely TV-focused filmography to this point. It has that look of such quasi-biopics, perhaps made a little bit too quickly, and with an eye on replication of key events as opposed to really inventive cinematography. I wouldn’t say that there are any really stand-out sequences in Scoop to really grab your attention, with not even the sections dedicated to the actual interview really anything more than fancy versions of the real-life thing. I suppose I should mention the efforts made at bringing you truly behind the scenes of places like the BBC – a scene where McAlister chats with a superior as lighting cues are decided upon for a later broadcast is decent – and “the Palace”, but for the most part it is just richly ornamented interiors with no real camerawork done to fully take advantage of them.
Scoop is a good example of a film made far too close to the material it is taking its story from. Lacking that distance, and the possibility of taking in the wider context, it is a flawed thing: too deadset on replicating the events in question to make a deeper point, too zeroed in on Andrew to the detriment of his alleged victims and too meandering in the way that it treats its various characters to be able to form a single coherent character arc for the viewer to be engaged with. This is simply too unsatisfying to be a good movie, and instead feels like something that will be all too easily forgotten in years to come, especially if someone else gets the chance to do the story more justice. Not recommended.
(All images are copyright of Netflix).
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