Year in Review. Two yummy look backs each day
Tim here. Among its many charms and disappointments, 2014 was an extraordinarily good year to be a fan of Scarlett Johansson.
No, I can go bigger than that: 2014 was a year that could make somebody a fan of Scarlett Johansson in the first place, or in my case, knock the dust off a fandom that had been growing stale over the last several years.
What makes it such a particularly interesting year to have watched the actress is the way that three of her four performances released in the United States in ’14 are variations on each other (the outlier is what amounts to cameo in Chef, more of a favor done for director Jon Favreau than a real part). Let’s take a quick look at each of them:
Under the Skin
In a holdover from the 2013 festival season Johansson played a non-human being in the human form of a gorgeous woman under the guiding hand of director Jonathan Glazer. Icy good looks married to a deliberately unknowable inner life pretty neatly describes the opinion that tends to be held on Johansson’s acting skills by people who don’t like her, which makes this, on the one hand, an easy casting decision. [More...]
But then, when the character begins to slowly have an influx of something deeper, maybe not human feelings exactly, Johansson proved very much up for the task of slowly introducing an inner life where one didn’t belong.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Released the very same day as Under the Skin came out in New York and Los Angeles, and undoubtedly seen by more viewers in its first 72 hours than will ever find their way to the Glazer picture, we next come to Johansson’s third turn in the role of Natasha “Black Widow” Romanoff, one of the non-superpowered members of the Avengers. It’s her best performance as the character, too, though the jump from her fun, easy take on the role in The Avengers is less impressive here than the geometric leap in quality that The Avengers represented over her brittle performance in Iron Man 2.
Lucy
Luc Besson’s pixie stix rush of insane science and demented “2001 meets Michael Bay” musings on human spiritual potential was maybe a little bit actor-proof, but Johansson threw herself into it anyway, playing a young woman unexceptional in every way other than her Besson-ready hotness, and tracking the process by which she delightedly finds that she becomes more powerful and aware of the universe as she, almost incidentally, becomes less human.
Now, Lucy is almost objectively the worst of these films, but I will confess that it was here that my feeling we were in the midst of a Golden Age of Scarlett Johansson clicked into place. Even as we can debate the quality of the film, it’s absolutely the case that it would not be as good as it is without the stabilizing presence of a performance like Johansson’s in the title role. God help me, I did actually enjoy Lucy, and she’s 95% of the reason why.
What’s really neat about Lucy, though, is that she’s the missing link which reveals the female in Under the Skin and Natasha – and we could easily throw in Johansson’s voice-only work as romantic computer program Samantha from Her in the final days of 2013, too – as part of a continuum. It’s a reverse-direction variant of Under the Skin, finding Johansson navigating the transition between being a collection of unknowable impulses in a sexy but chilly form, to becoming basically human. Like The Winter Soldier, it shows off Johansson’s surprisingly rich capacity to play an asskicking action heroine able to rattle off quippy dialogue and holding her own as an independent, self-sufficient personality in a generic framework that would typically peg her as “the hot chick” and be done with it (P.S. no Black Widow solo feature till at least 2019? Stop sucking, Marvel).
Taken as a whole, the 2014 crop of Johansson starring roles presents a sustained experiment in the actress investigating her strengths and weakness, both perceived and real. Inasmuch as she has a limited emotional range (a criticism I’ve always thought was overblown, but it’s out there), these three films exploit that fact rather than suffer from it. And all three rely on the actress playing up her physical attractiveness without, as a result, reducing her to the status of “object that is looked at”.
It is, a decade after her breakout, nothing less than a year-long attempt to find and shape the “Scarlett Johansson persona”. And the results couldn’t be more delightful. The quality of the films is extraordinarily variable – Under the Skin is one of the handful of absolute must-see films of the year, while I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending Lucy to anyone – but the actress is terribly intriguing in all of them. There have been more complete and involving movie performances this year, but nothing that makes such a fascinating case study in how acting actually works, and that’s enough right there for me to declare Johansson the MVP of screen acting in 2014.
