Movies: Scarlett Johansson: Match Point

She’s blond, she’s curvaceously configured, and she has those remarkably proportioned lips. Naturally, in tabloid land, they figure Scarlett Johansson for the latest in the long line of movie bombshells dating back at least to Jean Harlow. That is an image that her appearance as Nola Rice, tragic fulcrum of the plot Woody Allen has devised for his well-received new movie, Match Point, is bound to enhance—except with Johansson herself: “I never think about that stuff. I like to think of myself as, I go to work and I act. It’s my professional life.”

Match Point, as it happened, was a perfect test of her professional skills. Hired to replace Kate Winslet on a week’s notice, Johansson arrived on a London location never having met Allen or any of her fellow actors and was obliged immediately to plunge into one of her crucial scenes, in which, half drunk, she (temporarily) fends off the advances of Jonathan RhysMeyers, playing a character who may soon be her brother-in-law. She was, at the time, 19, and although she had been acting in movies for a decade, she had more often been a chastely yearned for object (Lost in Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring) than an active participant in a dark romance.

Johansson, 21, certainly does not see Nola as a femme fatale. To her, Nola is “a survivor—trying to make it any way she can.” Maybe so. But one can also profitably see her as an acutely observed projection of a typical post-adolescent female, sexually venturesome (“No one’s ever asked for their money back”), capable of a childish petulance and willfulness, yet also able to view with harsh, accurate cynicism the world of privilege she wants to join and needs to reject.

In short, she’s a complex handful—resisting her fate as a victim while lacking the smooth social skills and emotional coolness of her upper-crust tormentors. Johansson brings to the role a ferocity touched by terror that is new to her work. And impressive. It surely draws on Allen’s rich writing but not necessarily his directing. He’s famously hands-off in that department, which is just fine with Johansson. “I guess he hires actors he thinks will be capable of rounding out the characters he’s written,” she says. “I think actors appreciate that kind of respect.” Allen has returned the compliment in the most meaningful way he can, by hiring Johansson for his next picture. It’s a comedy called Scoop. And it’s already in the can.