Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Johansson regularly is near the top of polls of sexiest female celebrity these days, and I'm not about to argue. She manages to look both kittenish and voluptuous at the same time, and her smokey voice gives her an air of sophistication. She also is an actress of some reputation, unlike say, Jessica Alba, who is the other woman who tops these kind of lists. However, lately Johansson's career has been making some missteps, in my opinion. I've just finished watching a half dozen of her most recent films, as well as visiting her best performance, which was one of her first.

I think there may be two factors at work. One--she needs vocal training. Yes, her voice is sexy, but she isn't in full command of it. Two--she needs a strong director who knows what to do with her. Both of these are apparent in The Prestige, in which she is very ill-used. As a magician's assistant who manages to get involved with both rivals in this Christopher Nolan film, Johansson is asked to do impossible things and does them badly. First, she is asked to an English accent, and then she has to play a wronged woman, which she does shrilly. The role is somewhat similar to her part of Nola in Woody Allen's Match Point, but here I think she is better used. First of all, though the picture is set in England, Allen doesn't ask her to be British (he probably used an American actress to further emphasize her "otherness") and he tapped into what was interesting about her. Though the character played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers is a fool for getting involved with her, we can understand why he does, because Johansson plays a beguiling character.

Allen doesn't do Johansson any favors in Scoop (which I reviewed earlier on this blog). Here she is asked to do screwball comedy, and plays the role that Diane Keaton would have played thirty years ago, and the comparison isn't favorable to Scarlett. On a second viewing, though, I liked her a little better, and saw that she was making some interesting choices and at least was trying something different.

Where directors may make the biggest mistake, though, is regarding Scarlett's look as being period, when she is best suited for contemporary material. She has a timeless look, and no doubt she was cast in The Black Dahlia (also reviewed earlier on this blog) because without too much effort she looks like a film noir siren. But she is just lost in this film, trying to inhabit a character with a very disturbed past. It's a bit like watching someone play dress-up. She is better in A Good Woman, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, moved from Victorian England to the Italian coast in 1930. Here Johansson wears the vintage dresses, but instead of playing the femme fatale, she is the ingenue. As with Match Point, though she is surrounded by European actors, she plays an American.

Last night I saw The Island, Johansson's foray into blockbuster territory. A spectacular flop, Johansson plays a clone who is being harvested for organ transplant. It's not a role that asks for much other than looking worried and running a lot. The interesting thing about this film, which is standard summer popcorn fare, is how closely it hues to a B-film from the seventies called Parts: The Clonus Horror, which turned up in a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode. The plot is almost exactly the same, just dressed up with Michael Bay bombast.

Johansson's best performance continues to be in Ghost World, which I watched again the other night. It was her first role as an adult, as one of a pair of disaffected high school graduates. One girl, played by Thora Birch, does not want to enter society, and prefers to associate with oddballs. Johansson's character faces adulthood more realistically, getting a job, renting an apartment, and shopping for for functional, kitsch-less items. It's very rewarding to watch how two friends, faced with deciding their future, drift apart.

Johansson has two more films coming this year. One is The Nanny Diaries, a sort of Devil Wears Prada type film about a put-upon young woman playing nanny to some rich New York people, and The Other Boleyn Girl, in which she plays the sister of English queen Anne Boleyn. I hope she's worked on her English accent.