At the tail end of last year, Netflix’s The Crown finally reached its end after six seasons and almost 60 years of history covered, but they’re not done with the Royal Family yet. Scoop is a one-off feature film about the booking and execution of the bizarre and deeply incriminating 2019 interview with Prince Andrew by Emily Maitlis in which the Duke of York somehow dug a deeper hole for himself than the one his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein had left with him. It’s a fitting coda to the Queen Elizabeth saga that Netflix have sunk so much time and money into (though the late monarch does not appear on screen herself here) – gone is the wonderment and sense of history that pervaded the early seasons of The Crown, replaced with the grubbiness and entitlement that that façade was always hiding.
Though not directly connected to the TV show, Netflix is happy to draw a line between Scoop and The Crown, with direction provided by Philip Martin, who directed 7 episodes of the latter, and the role of Emily Maitlis going to The Crown’s version of Thatcher herself, Gillian Anderson. It’s a fun bit of continuity, though it does also mean that Scoop struggles to really establish itself as a proper standalone movie, a situation not helped by the very pedestrian filmmaking on offer – a humdrum grey hangs over every frame.
It would have been good to grant Scoop more of a sense of a visual identity, because the main problem here is that there just isn’t much to the story – a strange failing to have in a film about one of the most famous sexual abuse stories in human history. For most of the first half of the film we follow Sam McAlister (played by Billie Piper), the BBC Newsnight booker upon whose memoir the events of the film are based, as she secures the interview itself through a series of conversations with Andrew’s ultra-loyal private secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes).
Outside of a prologue that retells the story of how the infamous Andrew/Epstein New York park photos were taken by a British pap, which is shot like a sniper mission from a war thriller, this build-up stuff just isn’t very interesting, despite some solid writing from Peter Moffat and decent across-the-board performances. You’re just waiting for the interview itself to kick off (and, honestly, just watching the real thing on YouTube is probably more gripping) – there’s very little drama to be found in its setup phases, no matter how many concerned looks everyone’s giving each other.
Scoop’s big gun is then, rather inevitably, Rufus Sewell as Andrew. Layered in very convincing prosthetics that turn Sewell half into a royal and half into a human-slug hybrid, he’s by turns pathetic, needlingly creepy, and naïve – a posh and entitled little boy who has always been far too coddled and thus never needed to grow up. It’s a great turn from Sewell that instantly gets into the heart and soul of a man who has never found much use for either, someone uncaring enough to commit great evil but too stupid to realise he might one day have to answer for that.
Lost in a lot of this, though, is the actual gravity of Andrew’s crimes – outside of Sewell’s performance, no one involved here seems to be truly willing to engage with the fact that this is a film about a man credibly accused of paedophilic rape, and so the whole affair is rather too light, with its big emotional wins at the end stunted by the fact. As a brisk retelling of a story we all already know, Scoop is undeniably diverting, its 100-ish minute runtime mostly breezing by, but it really should also be a lot more memorable.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 