Scarlett Johansson, 2014's MVP
Tuesday, December 23, 2014 at 10:30AM 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.
Reader Comments (16)
I think of Keira Knightley, Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley as coming to the fore as "adult" starlets around the same year (2002-3).
One of them has an Oscar; two of them have interesting rangey careers. Go figure.
And Natalie Portman*
Her performance in Under the Skin is probably my favorite of the year-male or female. And your description of the performance is so wonderful that there's nothing much left to add except that I hope people discover this wonderfully strange film over the years.
With Scarlett in Under the Skin and Nicole Kidman in Birth, is Jonathan Glazer the unheralded new master of directing actresses to career-best work? Let's hope he doesn't have to wait 10+ years for his next feature. All auteur-minded actresses should be clamoring for the opportunity to work with him. Are you listening Cate/Marion/Tilda/Julianne?
Lovely write-up, Tim. Under The Skin will be remembered as a career peak for a while.
Think there's a typo there, Tim - I think you meant that Lucy is almost objectively the *best* of the three ;)
Otherwise, agreed on all fronts - this was totally Scarlett's year. We should all just consider ourselves lucky she deigned to share it with us without sucking us out of our skin, breaking our necks or absorbing us into a higher realm of human consciousness.
A very good choice. I'd also have Julianne Moore, Keira Knightley, Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler was his best, but his work in Enemy was stellar too) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw in the running.
And Tilda Swinton, Jack O'Connell, Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon, Rose Byrne...
I agree under the skin is awesome and scarjo has been great. But Lucy is my pick for worst movie of the year. That wasn't her fault though. She was still fine in the film
Glad you also mention Her. Sure it was a "2013 release" but it made 93% of its box office money in 2014.
Couldn't agree more! Between last year's one-two punch of Don Jon and Her and this year's triple crown, it's a pity we can't easily twist her name into some McConnaissance/Reesurgence kind of moniker.
Also, Lucy was maybe the most fun I've had at the movies all year. I know there's all kinds of ickiness basically embedded in it, but while watching it I couldn't have cared less about that, mostly because Scarlett was fully tapping into her considerable movie-star charisma to push it all over.
1 year too late! Last year was her resurgence for sure.
Scarlett's been on a roll this year and Under the Skin is the indication that she is one of the best actresses working today. The time has come for her to take charge and get better roles. Plus, I'm waiting for a film where she and Jena Malone play lesbian-lovers.
YESSS, was all I could muster reading this tribute. Give her all of the awards already!
Anonny -- we gave her a medal last year as well. this is a body of work tribute.
A worthy choice. Film career-wise, hers was an 18-month turnaround (Jan. 2013, with Don Jon's screening at Sundance, till Lucy's debut last July). I worry -- should I worry? -- that her new baby will slow the momentum (ScarJomentum), but I hope she really capitalizes on what could be a critical next couple of years of her bankability and castability. (Get an Oscar and/or and Emmy to go along tiwht Tony, girl!)
I'm Danish, and as a Dane you cannot NOT be a little proud of her, her being half Danish and all, but the truth is she's had a really disappointing career. Lost In Translation was/is/will always be a work of genius on her part, she's so heartbreaking in that movie. But everything she's done after that, performance-wise and film-wise, is so unremarkable / forgettable.
She's never been outright bad, except for maybe Black Dahlia in which she's so out of her depth it's not even funny.
Mostly she's just been... mediocre; regarding Under The Skin, yeah she's pretty good in that movie, but when Lucy came around she was back to being completely unremarkable / forgettable.