Regardless of what you ultimately thought of it, part of — scratch that, most of — the buzz surrounding last year’s Match Point
was undeniably a result of writer-director Woody Allen abandoning the
comfortable terrain of New York and lighting out for across the pond,
where he delivered a much darker film than that for which he has been
previously, or at least recently, known. It was the very stark contrast
to the rest of his work that had people outside of his most hardcore
devotees jazzed about seeing an Allen film again. The similarly
London-set Scoop, unfortunately, plays as the lesser film in a
double bill with that thriller, a ramshackle and laboriously whimsical
comedic trifle that falls back on the filmmaker’s increasingly tired
penchant for nattering faux-realism.

Scarlett Johansson), in town visiting friends, gets plucked
from the audience for a trick. She’s then visited by an apparition of
Strombel, who feeds her a series of cryptic clues pointing to British
aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), and urges her to pursue the
story.

Taking a phony name and introducing Sid as her father, Sondra poses
as an actress and romantically snuggles up to Peter. She discovers a
deck of tarot cards in his tucked-away music room, as well as
additional secretive behavior, but has her share of doubts, even as
further visits from Strombel provide more information. Sid wants no
part of the investigation, but feels caught up in it by a need to
protect Sondra.

Allen clearly wants to use Lyman’s positioning within posh English
society as a contrasting backdrop for the movie’s two American
characters — one intrepid, one spineless — and he sets Scoop’s
light narrative gallop to an array of mischievously inquisitive
classical music, including Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake Ballet Suite” and
Johan Strauss’ “Annen-Polka.” But there are a clutch of small
inconsistencies and incongruities within the story, including one scene
in which a newspaper editor relates a piece of secondhand information
that he claims Peter’s father told him, a piece of information that
would directly contradict Sondra’s “front” to the Lyman family. One’s
pulse quickens here, expecting a fresh twist. Instead, it appears to be
merely a narrative flub.

Problems like this — and the manner in which Allen cuts quickly on
certain scenes, obviously trimming lead and trailing dialogue — give
the movie and its headlong dash toward conclusion the feeling of a
series of dopey vignettes. This certainly isn’t enhanced when a smitten
Peter suddenly leaves town on Sondra’s birthday after giving her a
gift, freeing her to dine with Sid. This and other moments like it defy
reasonable plausibility.

If its narrative isn’t one to hook audiences, Scoop at least
allows Johansson a chance to nicely subvert her burgeoning sexpot
image. With her round specs and a somewhat golly-gee persona, Sondra is
part Nancy Drew, part smitten bobbysoxer — and Johansson plays her with
a sunny and believably adolescent mix of aplomb and self-doubt. Even
if, that is, the story early on undermines this by setting Sondra up as
a bit of a floozy. In what is a somewhat uncomfortable window into
Allen’s imagination, Sondra — in an attempt to get an interview —
beds, off-camera, a film director. I’m not quite sure what
Allen’s trying to say about journalism here, and I’m not sure he knows
either. The big scoop on Scoop is that there really isn’t one. (Focus Features, PG-13, 95 mins.)