It’s not easy, in the noisy burble of modern cinema, for actors to capture our attention — let alone the attention of award voters — when they’re keeping silent on screen. When it happens, it’s usually because the setting explicitly allows them that silence and even makes it part of the role’s charm. (Jean Dujardin in “The Artist,” for instance.)
But what about the reverse? Someone who does plenty of talking but is never seen at all? The obvious example is voice-acting in animated features, increasingly common given the expansion of that genre. Yet this season the same can also be said of someone in a full-blooded live-action movie: Scarlett Johansson, who as a HAL-like A.I. creation in love with Joaquin Phoenix in the upcoming Spike Jonze romantic fantasy “Her,” does a whole lot of chatting and conveys a whole lot of modalities — funny, confident, sexy, scared — without ever showing her face.
The Johansson performance works on a particular level. Because her voice is so distinct, and because it’s usually coming out of such a familiar face, she actually has to spend the first part the movie making us forget who it belongs to. It’s a tall order, but, in her hands (or vocal chords) it’s achieved with some ease.
When Johansson is first heard in the film, telling Phoenix’s sweet loner that she has just read a book of baby names in the fraction of a second it took him to ask for her name and chosen “Samantha,” you might find yourself thinking ‘this is Scarlett Johansson, and she has come to be a beautiful disruption in Phoenix’s life.” But it doesn’t take long for it to stop being that, and start being Samantha. Someone with a wide range of qualities, of which romantic is just one. It’s exceptional, unique, well, her.
It’s a not insignificant feat, made stronger by the fact that Johansson is actually playing someone who needs to sound and feel like a person even though, at bottom, she’s not.
“One of the many things Scarlett and I were talking about,” the director told an audience at an AFI screening this week, is that “when Samantha was created she doesn’t have any fears or baggage or doubts like we do.” In Jonze’s world, creating an interesting digital character is actually more complicated than creating a human one.
Or as Johansson put it to my colleague Chris Lee recently: “It's so much more than a voice-over."
The back story — Johansson was cast after the movie had finished shooting and recorded her part when she and Phoenix were miles if not oceans apart (Samantha Morton had initially been cast and performed the part throughout the shoot, hence the “Samantha”) — only makes it more impressive. In sports terms, it’s a quarterback hitting a well-covered receiver right in the numbers while wearing a blindfold.
Whether Oscar voters recognize all of this remains to be seen. History isn’t encouraging. A voice performance from an animated movie has never garnered an Oscar nomination, and even hybrid live-animated roles like Andy Serkis in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” or Zoe Saldana in “Avatar” tend to get short shrift.
Perhaps aware of all that, studio Warner Bros. is taking a lower-key approach, running Johansson as a supporting actor, even though a case can be made that, in terms of screen time, it’s actually a lead performance. Supporting-actor categories tend to be weaker and the standards more flexible, so this, they perceive, is where Johansson has the best shot.
It’s interesting that Johansson’s part is coming the same season as that of an actor who perfectly inverts the Johansson model: Robert Redford. The veteran barely utters a word as a desperate sailor in J.C. Chandor's nautical drama “All Is Lost,” doing the acting with his face and body. Redford is getting loads of Oscar attention, is practically a shoo-in to be nominated and even considered by some as a front-runner to win.
Johansson, on the other hand, has not been nearly as favored, and though "Her" has just begun screening for tastemakers in the last month, it’s hard to imagine the needle swinging wildly in her direction in the weeks ahead. Some will quietly say that voice acting requires only half the muscles, so even a great performance should only be judged as half as good. And, paradoxically, Johansson’s acting in the movie far away from the rest of the cast could hurt her. Some voters would see it as a less pure form of acting, even though almost any actor you talk to will tell you it’s exponentially harder.
Pointedly, though. Johansson and Redford have a lot in common. Like Johansson, he is using a trademark aspect — in this case, his cartographically lined face — and asking us to put aside all our suppositions about that trademark, as prominently isolated as it is, and believe in the character.
If Oscar voters did reward her Johansson with a nomination, it would be seen by some as a sign of the expanding Motion Picture Academy mindset, one that also may one day make room for an Andy Serkis. But in some ways it would also be a nod to Oscar tradition, a sign that, whether in a computer-generated world or an old-fashioned one, a great performance is a great performance regardless of which acting elements it draws on.
Rihanna looks amazing in the What Now video, but why'd she waste that look on Unapologetic?
Maybe she thought it was a blatant Rated R rihmake, which it is, but I still kinda use.
If only the song was good.
KSATRL is a mess.