In the annals of sudden career rejuvenation, Woody Allen's recent transatlantic jaunt has to rank among the most unexpected and most welcome. Last year's Match Point, while little more than a smooth repackaging of the Martin Landau half of Crimes and Misdemeanors, evinced a level of confidence and craftsmanship that I'd never expected to see from the guy again. Now comes Scoop, his second consecutive film set and shot in London, as well the second in a row to star Scarlett Johansson, and it's easily his funniest picture since Bullets Over Broadway, which came out midway through the Clinton administration. Since Allen has made 12 films since then, at least 10 of which could sensibly be classified as comedies, you'd think that would amount to something more than moderately funny. But after enduring the leaden likes of Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Anything Else, even a moderately funny Woody Allen picture now feels like a major event.
Like Match Point, Scoop revisits and expands on previous Allen territory, though I'm inclined to forgive a certain amount of repetition from an artist as prolific as he is. (Scoop is his 36th feature as writer/director.) First reference point: Allen's contribution to New York Stories, "Oedipus Wrecks," in which the plot is jump-started by a magician's vanishing act gone awry. Here, the magician is the Woodman himself, playing a corny vaudevillian conjurer known as Splendini, who shoots the audience a sickly, that-didn't-totally-suck-did-it? smile at the conclusion of each moldy routine. When Splendini plucks enterprising young journalism student Sondra Pransky (Johansson) from the crowd and stuffs her into a cabinet, not only does she disappear, but someone appears to her: Joe Strombel (Deadwood's Ian McShane), a legendary Fleet Street reporter who received the story of his life about 10 minutes after he died, and who has escaped the Grim Reaper so that he can pass it along to Sondra. A serial killer is on the loose, and the culprit, Strombel claims, is none other than Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), the debonair playboy son of Lord Lyman. Changing her name to Jade Spence and introducing Splendini (real name: Sid Waterman) as her father, Sondra vigorously pursues this otherworldly tip, with Allen tagging along and kvetching just as he did in Manhattan Murder Mystery.
The moment I learned that Allen appears as an actor in Scoop, my heart sank, since he's turned into a frantic self-parody over the past decade. Bits of his performance here still feel strained, but this is the first real glimmer of the classic Woody persona in ages, and it works, I suspect, precisely because he's removed the character from his usual context. Even in his heyday, Allen's neurotic-New-York-Jew routine arguably was funniest the one time he took it on the road, during the late stretch of Annie Hall when Alvy follows Annie to California. Here, just being surrounded by pompous Brits seems to relax him considerably—he has something to bounce off of, which means he doesn't have to constantly up the tic-ridden ante to get laughs. Even his one-liners, which have been labored and stale of late, have some of the old zing to them. Asked his religion, Sid replies that he was born into the Hebrew persuasion but converted to narcissism in his mid-30s, or words to that effect—what I know for sure is that the joke's punchline ("narcissism") is buried in the middle of the sentence rather than deployed like a bomb at the end, which is the kind of comedic finesse I was afraid Allen had lost forever.
Don't get too excited, though. Scoop makes other late Allen comedies look even more feeble by comparison, but it's still only half of a great movie, with a 50 percent hit rate for the gags and a semi-inspired turn by Johansson, who isn't really built for screwball goofiness but makes a valiant attempt at channeling her inner Diane Keaton. The story, pivoting as it does on Sondra/Jade's growing yen for her quarry, is flimsy and often predictable, and McShane, who fairly sets the screen afire on Deadwood, is given so little to do here that he spends most of his time looking vaguely puzzled, as if unsure why he'd been hired. Still, I did laugh out loud repeatedly, and that alone makes this feel like a triumph. Working in England seems to have freed Allen from the cocoon of insularity in which he'd been moldering—imagine what he might accomplish if he were to move on to, say, France.