Woody Allen’s leading lady (Scarlett Johansson) falls in love—and in a one-off master stroke, it’s not with a New York nudnik.

"Scoop"
Directed by Woody Allen
BBC Films

4 stars

News flash! The rumors are real, the gossip is genuine: Woody Allen has shacked up in London with a beautiful broad—and this time, it’s not Soon-Yi.

An ocean away and many years after the Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi scandal, Allen has gotten his due revenge on the press with the remarkably pensive and sadistically funny film “Scoop.”

Though Allen’s latest involves a change of topic (examining the world of journalism) as well as one of location, the legendary actor/director chooses to stick to his trademark style, examining his own Freudian desires and the politics of film through wry, nervous humor. The choice proves an excellent one: “Scoop” is easily the most thoughtful comedy of the summer.

Succeeding the likes of Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow, Allen’s golden girl du jour is Scarlett Johansson, back after her performance in the brilliant “Match Point.” Johansson plays Sondra Pransky, a gawky American journalism student as out of place in London as Allen’s on-screen alter ego, the cynical magician Sid Waterman. Not unlike Allen himself, Sid is searching for easy-to-please deep-pocketed clientele (which he finds in the stilted British upper class), and befriends Sondra along the way.

As the film’s director and writer, Allen gets plenty of comedic mileage out of the strangers-in-a-strange-land shtick. However, a strong trepidation lies beneath the laughs. Excluding “Match Point,” “Scoop” is the only movie Allen has shot abroad in his thirty years of directing. Away from his New York stomping ground, he’s the new kid on the block, and he seems nervous about ending up as the crass “Ugly American” among an old-world city’s cinematic elite.

What results is a mockery of American insensitivity, sweetly embodied by Sondra’s spunky candor and naiveté. Naturally, though, Allen’s exploration of this transatlantic cultural divide includes a few jabs at presumed British prestige. Leaving a party after a card trick, for example, Sid remarks, “I was just about to pull quarters out of the Lady’s nose.”

Prominent among these potshots is the casting of Australian Hugh Jackman (“X-Men”) as Peter Lyman, the son of a British Lord who Sondra meets—and subsequently falls for—while investigating a string of murders. Most of Allen’s skittishness seems to be rooted in the loss of the mutual understanding he had with New Yorkers, and the need to find something similar in London. A few delightful moments of Woody Allen 101 ensue, as when he explains to a British Lady, “I was born into the Hebrew faith, but I converted to narcissism.” As unexpected culture shock sets in, Allen betrays an apprehension about being culturally accepted by Londoners that never seemed to surface in “Match Point.”

Thankfully, as with “Annie Hall” and some of Allen’s other films, it is the director’s nervous tics that drive “Scoop” to hilarity. The other actors’ performances aren’t quite on-par with those of earlier Woody pieces—Jackman’s Australian accent occasionally surfaces, and Johansson’s Sondra is uneven—but they never cause the film to lose comic traction.

As with his other leading roles, Allen’s Sid isn’t so much a character as an extension of Allen himself, a manifestation of the anxiety that ripples through the film’s director. For once, that anxiety might be justified: the end of the film suggests that, while Sondra’s brusque American charm could breathe some welcome life into the London elite, cynical New Yorkers of Allen’s generation might not have a place in European high society.

And yet one of the best things about “Scoop” is that Allen’s predicament remains his own. Close up, the fear and disappointment of it all might even prove disconcerting, but it’s great fun to watch from the comfortable distance of the other side of the Atlantic.

—Reviewer Kyle L. K. McAuley can be reached at kmcauley@fas.harvard.edu.