Scoop
Even those of us who weren't wholly enthralled with last year's ``Match Point " had to acknowledge that Woody Allen had found his second wind -- that relocating to England and hiring A-list talent had recharged the filmmaker's creative batteries. He even seemed interested in real people again. The news that the 70-year-old director would stay on in London and retain Scarlett Johansson for a comedy held out hope that the comeback would stick and perhaps deepen, and that the old Woody -- engaged, wise, profoundly funny -- would somehow emerge from the carapace of his recent work.
No such luck, it saddens me to report. ``Scoop" is distinctly minor Allen, with less weight to it than one of his old humor doodles in The New Yorker. A fluffy, fatally implausible farce about an American journalism student given the scoop of a lifetime by a deceased reporter, the movie's hard to hate but impossible to work up any enthusiasm over. It wants to be an effervescent summer cooler, but the tonic's gone flat.
Johansson plays the journalism student, Sondra Pransky , a Brooklyn naif with owlish glasses and a zeal that's alternately adorable and dunderheaded. In town visiting friends, she's visited by the ghost of a recently expired Fleet Street reporter, the storied Joe Strombel (Ian McShane ), who has picked up a nugget of news from a fellow passenger (Fenella Woolgar ) on the slow boat across the River Styx.
The scoop is this: The dreaded Tarot Card serial killer may be none other than Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman ), the dashing businessman son of Lord Lyman (Julian Glover ). ``Get the story first, but first get the story right," instructs the shabby shade. Unfortunately, he doesn't offer any advice about falling in love with your quarry.
Sondra happens to be onstage in a magician's disappearing-act box when Joe appears to her, and the magician in question is a schlump named Sidney Waterman (Allen), a.k.a. The Great Splendini , apparently a first cousin to Broadway Danny Rose . At first dismissive of the girl's story, he's soon brought around, and ``Scoop" becomes a comedy of ill manners as Sidney tails Sondra on her investigations, pretending to be her eccentric moneybags father.
The argumentative byplay between these two is more hectic than funny, although Allen can't help getting off a good line now and then. (Addressing a swank London crowd at a party: ``I was born into the Hebrew persuasion, but I converted to Narcissism.") More often than not, the shtick and the stammer are wearying ends in themselves, and you realize that Sidney would have no earthly reason to be here if the director weren't playing him. The sad fact is that a Woody Allen movie with Woody Allen in it has become an occasion for dismay.
Nor is it remotely believable that Peter, a titled and class-conscious Brit, would be dazzled by this gauche American beyond a quick roll in the hay, even if she is played by Scarlett Johansson. Without a character to portray, Jackman thus has little to do but smile and look handsome, which he does surpassingly well. A department store dummy might have been cheaper, though.
Friendly and very inconsequential, the film's essentially ``Match Point" turned inside out and shaken for laughs. That's not a terrible idea, but what is it about young women threatened with grievous bodily harm that fascinates this director? The film skates gaily along Allen's obsessions without investigating them; you'd think a lifetime on the couch would have yielded something, but the human insights of ``Annie Hall " and ``Hannah and Her Sisters " have never seemed further off.
Instead, Allen lavishes his camera on his female star, which may be creepy but is also a long-established filmmaker's prerogative. Johansson dives happily into her role here, making Sondra a sensuous screwball pain in the neck -- the sort of lovely American idiot who saves the day without knowing why. (The character's also a bit of a roundheel , falling into bed with older men on a rapturous whim. You wish, Woody.)
You can assume this kind of humor goes over well with the Europeans who are the director's financial backers and primary audience these days. Like Charlie Chaplin in his final years, Allen has found refuge in exile, far from the US audiences who have turned their backs on him (because we're lowbrow slobs or because his movie have stopped being very good; your call). When we see him onstage as The Great Splendini, Allen even eerily resembles Chaplin in ``Limelight ," shyly smiling out at the audience with the comedian's eternal hope of unconditional love. Does he see anything besides the beautiful young woman and himself? Sweet and woebegone, ``Scoop" says no.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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