"The Curse of the Jade Scorpion"

Woody Allen's newest movie is a pinched affair, with every joke quashed. And would Elizabeth Berkeley really fall for him?

By Charles Taylor

Aug 24, 2001 | If there's any reason left to feel fondly toward Woody Allen, it's because, after years of betraying his talent with pallid imitations of Bergman and Fellini, after all the highly praised drab and moralizing stinkers like "Crimes and Misdemeanors," even after all this, he still dreams of being Bob Hope.

Allen has made no secret of his admiration for Hope or of Hope's influence on him. In his nervier comic moments, you could see Allen trying on Hope's persona, the coward on the make who puts on a show of brash bravado. That was the character Hope perfected in his movies of the '40s and '50s, the series of "Road" pictures he made with Bing Crosby, and others like "My Favorite Brunette" and "Son of Paleface." (I still laugh whenever I think of Hope as a baby photographer, replete with beret, smock, and floppy bow tie, in "My Favorite Brunette," having his hand chomped by a Chinese toddler he's been kitchy-kooing. Turning to the boy's mother, Hope asks, "Don't you feed him meat at home? Happy little gourmet!")

Those movies were, at best, casually made and the casualness was what made them funny. Nothing, not the minimal production values nor the minimal plots, got in the way of the laughs. The plots were deliberately disposable, giving the performers plenty of room to clown around.

Allen's new picture, "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," is nothing but plot and production values, and there's barely a laugh in it that isn't quashed. The problem isn't that the story -- an ace insurance investigator (Allen) becomes hypnotized by a nefarious magician (David Ogden Stiers) and becomes a jewel thief doing his master's bidding -- is silly. It's meant to be silly. It's that Allen sticks to it. At one time, back in the days of "Take the Money and Run" or "Sleeper," he understood how to use a premise as an excuse for gags. But he has become far too meticulous a filmmaker for casual throwaway comedy.

That's a worse problem than the bum timing and lame jokes. There's no sense of play in "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," no sense of the actors' cutting loose to amuse themselves or us. The whole movie gives off the glum, deadening feel of people working at having a good time, wanting to be rewarded merely because they're attempting a '40s comedy. It isn't that the sweat shows -- Woody Allen makes movies too refined for sweat; it's more like any sense of natural interplay has been expunged. Even when Allen and Helen Hunt, as the office manager he's at war with, begin yelling at each other, there's no sense of their getting caught up in the heat of the scene. It's a tightly controlled display of temper.

The movie might be a museum exhibit of '40s New York interiors, or a series of retro settings cooked up for a special feature in "Architectural Digest." During one scene, when Allen is consulting with a co-worker in his office, I found my eyes drifting to the polished glow coming off the antique oak filing cabinet. Designed to mummification by Santo Loquasto and shot by Zhao Fei in plummy browns and golds, "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" looks too rich, too burnished for comedy.

Even the crummy apartment where Allen's character lives with its tiny service kitchen and floral patterned wallpaper that has seen better days is sumptuously crummy. You can't settle into the movie and start laughing because you're aware of all the work that has gone into creating the period look. The look and sets of the movies Allen is aping weren't exactly ugly. They were serviceable. These settings are handsome and high-toned and, in their dogged determination to be charming throwbacks, oppressive. They crush the life out of any inclination toward high spirits.

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