Scoop (2006)

The dual elixirs of London and Scarlett Johansson did wonders for Woody Allen last year. On holiday from a hometown that had lost all expression of vitality in his movies, temporarily transplanted to London, and creatively aroused by a strikingly confident young actress not yet 22, Allen responded with Match Point, his best movie in years, and his most psychologically liberated. In Johansson's bold and blunt-talking presence, the septuagenarian director found permission to trade in his worn-out character types for players who were audacious and surprising. And in Allen, the throaty star of Lost in Translation with the cool, open look of all-American sexual self-possession found an amusing, elderly gentleman champion of delightful and delightfully flattering intellectual cachet.

It's easy to see why the two would want to work together in London again. But it's hard to fathom how, in so short a time, the enduring Svengali of neurotic mannerisms could have gotten one of Hollywood's most individualistic sirens to sound like Julie Kavner and behave like yet another jabbering schlemiel from Mr. Allen's neighborhood, joining the ranks of zombified imitators as diverse as Will Ferrell, Christina Ricci, and Kenneth Branagh. In the labored romantic-comedy whodunit Scoop — a companion piece to Match Point that suffers all the more in comparison — the fearless Hitchcock blonde plays along with the conceit that she's the infelicitously named Sondra Pransky, styled with nerd-girl eyeglasses. A Jewish college student who switched from dental studies to journalism, Sondra is visiting posh family friends in London when a chance visit to a borscht-belt-type magic show staged by one Sid Waterman (Allen) changes her fate (a plot device reworked from his own chapter in New York Stories), putting her on the trail of a serial murderer known as the Tarot Card Killer. Is the fiend in fact the suave aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman)? Intelligence is iffy, since the tip was provided to Sondra during Sid's magic act by the visiting ghost of a recently deceased newspaperman (Ian McShane, reminding us, by his very stare, to watch Deadwood).

As in Match Point, the class-resistant Yank is attracted to the upper-class Brit, falling into a romance with Lyman that allows plenty of time for Match Point cinematographer Remi Adefarasin to admire stately homes and gardens. But unlike its predecessor, Scoop also possessively tethers its bodacious leading lady to the über-shtick of Allen himself. For a fellow so slight of frame, he has become a leaden weight on screen, and his hiccuping delivery of hoary self-referential jokes about Jewish anxiety and ineptitude, along with Woodyish predilections for much younger women, has worn from the dully familiar to the downright irritating. Blessed with an actress who raises his game, Allen has scooped up Johansson — and neutralized her power.

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