I can’t quite place why I like Scoop, especially considering that I found Woody Allen’s last film Match Point sullied primarily by the fact that, while it was about how a character made a series of moral decisions that led up to a murder, the movie was a character piece made out of the most one-dimensional of characters. Perhaps why I take to Scoop is that it is essentially a remake of Match Point from a different point of view and with it a different tone. The wealthy character who makes the moral decision, Hugh Jackman’s son-of-a-lord Peter Lyman, is presumed to have already murdered by the start of the movie, and instead of us following him as he lives his life in such a way to lead to a murder, we instead follow the investigations of an amateur journalist, Sondra (Scarlett Johansson), who is trying to find the story behind London’s “Tarot Card Killer,” whom she suspects is Lyman. Maybe “suspects” isn’t the right word; rather, she was told, told from beyond the grave, by a deceased British journalist (Ian McShane), who happened to be riding Death’s boat with a victim of the killer. By dismissing the interest of action (the murder) and motive (why one murders), the film likewise dismisses drama; by embracing the interest of duplicity, of questioning whether what may be there may in fact be there, that a man who seems like he isn’t a killer may be, the film erupts in comedy. In a way, McShane’s character is telling Sondra about what happened in Match Point, and is asking her to question the earnestness and uprightness of that film’s pretensions, here embodied in Peter Lyman. Sondra is assisted in her mission to seduce clues out of Lyman—naturally a mission that grows ever more conflicted as the couple begin to fall for each other—by another amateur, this one a vaudevillian magician named Splendini, nee Sid Waterman (Allen), who witnesses the ghostly appearances with Sondra and who gets roped into her ruse by posing as her father, an American oilman with a preference for parlor card tricks.

In a comedic mode, away from the comedy of relationship foibles, closer in tone to farce, but told in a kind of languid speed constantly at odds with the kind of screwball comedies Allen is obliquely referencing, Scoop seems to work, if oddly at that. Inconsistently shot in the kind of one-conversation-one-take style Allen is fond of, sidled with more conventional shot/reverse-shot sequences, awkward framing and seemingly random camera movements (yet still sustaining a continuity with Match Point through the glowing photography from Remi Adefarasin), the mise-en-scène is airy and empty, secluded even, as if no one else exists in the world beyond the two, and occasionally three, people talking to one another at a time. The actors often, and quite obviously flub their lines during the long-takes is emblematic of this seemingly slip-shod style of the film, which is part charmingly gawky, part subversively myopic, but often just poorly directed.

Trust and faith in the surface of things are the two key thematic motifs, both in terms of Sandra’s oscillating passion for and suspicion of Lyman, and for Sid’s cringing over following Sandra through such a questionable, and possibly dangerous, deception. The movie reaches its moments of high comedy as Allen, who has not been this funny in years, attempts to “charm” the aristocratic circle with ingrained deprecation and sly mockery, as he moves in this wealthy sphere while Sandra pursues Lyman. As Sandra digs deep into the upper-class, finding its contradictions through her deeply personal relationship with Lyman, Waterman works on the superficial extremities of the class, gnawing away at and joshing with the people around Sandra’s victim. Waterman repeats to them the same lines he repeats to the audience members he pulls up on stage during his magic act, typical audience-schlock about how he loves them, they are wonderful human beings, a credit to their race. The idea here, and also the surprising heart of Scoop, both in this repetition and in Sid’s evident loneliness (not to mention the loneliness of Allen’s mise-en-scène) and Sandra’s restlessness, is in his relationship with the intrepid journalist to whom he initially spouts these false compliments but later comes to mean sincerely. His relationship with her quickly becomes warm and protective, affectionate, playful, and caring—all emblemized by the duo’s increasing desire to cut through the bullshit around them, solve the mystery, and ultimately believe in each other and themselves.

Unfortunately, in that strange, constantly conflicting, constantly, uneven, and often peculiarly beguiling way in which the film seems to be made, Sandra herself is given a characterization as thin and inconsistent as most of Allen’s characters of late. Sandra shifts from being a contrast between Johansson’s stunning looks and an engagingly, Allen-ly geeky demeanor, and from being simply a lackluster, plot-moving investigator. Johansson’s dual roll somewhat works, because while Allen smartly plays her story-based straight-forwardness against his character’s own preference for rambling and talky jokes, in this particular mode getting Sandra alone with the (possibly intentionally) featureless Lyman the movie would come to a dull halt. As such, Allen encourages and receives bright comedy from the actress when the male lead, here the lifeless Jackman, is not funny. It is a shame Sandra could not have been written with more consistency and integrated into the film without this awkward, if useful, dualism. Sandra’s conduct with Peter Lyman is ultimately the issue of the film, her desire to buy into the falsity, blandness, and ease of the film’s upper-classes conflicting with her self-realization with Splendini, of seeing the trick in the world and exposing it (Sandra dreaming to become a star-reporter). Sid’s magical profession is not a random element of the script, as the movie is heartily, if haphazardly and somewhat inconsequently, about on what side of the deception the heart lies. It is Sandra, who seems to show an element of fear for the possibility that Lyman is a murderer (even while McShane’s character mocks Death), who is the core of the film, as the ending, which comically but unorthodoxly dismisses Sid, makes clear. It is mostly about realization, seeing behind Lyman’s plain, but attractive exterior to the crime within, and likewise seeing behind Sid’s bluster, dismissals, and fumbling to his care for Sandra. If Match Point was about what a morally compromised person can do when put in an awful, trying position, the elements that move forward to bring about death, Scoop is about coming to terms that not everything is what it seems, and about laughing at the seriousness of the façade and understanding what is behind it, for better or for worse.