Scarlett Johansson gives what may well be the performance of her career in Spike Jonze’s “Her,’’ opening Friday. But we never actually see her in the movie — the bodacious actress provides the voice of the title character, a computer operating system who seduces a writer (Joaquin Phoenix) going through a rough divorce.
Progressively flirtatious, sympathetic, neurotic, yearning and callous as the OS Samantha, it’s a vocal tour-de-force by an actress whose in-person performances have often seemed self-conscious on the big screen. It doesn’t hurt that Jonze has written Johansson a more complex character, with better lines, than those played by Amy Adams and Rooney Mara.
Johansson’s work so impressed the jury at the recent Rome Film Festival that they gave her their best actress award.
But the Hollywood Foreign Press Association recently notified Warner Bros. that the voice performance was ineligible for the Golden Globes — just as the HFPA refused to consider Andy Serkis’ voice-and-motion capture work in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’’ and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.’’
Johansson remains technically eligible for an Oscar nomination — but there’s absolutely no precedent there for honoring voice-only performances. It hasn’t happened for any animated film ever, or for James Earl Jones as Darth Vader, Seth MacFarlane in “Ted’’ — or for the most famous computer voice of all time: Douglas Rain, as HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey.’’
A Warner Bros. rep told the Hollywood Reporter the studio plans to campaign for Johansson to receive a nomination. But perhaps muddying the waters for Johansson’s awards hopes is the odd fact that in most of Phoenix’s scenes, he’s acting in response to vocals from another actress.
While “Her’’ was in production, actress Samantha Morton played the computer alter ego and was in a booth on the set feeding lines to Phoenix. But then, months later, Jonze decided he needed to recast the part of Samantha.
“We just couldn’t get there,’’ Jonze told New York Magazine. “Making a movie like this, in which a character only exists in her voice, in the reaction of a character on-screen, and in the viewer’s imagination — she had to exist just in the air — it’s hard to know what’s going to make that work. We didn’t know until we got deep into post-production.’’
The younger Johansson — the star of “Lost in Translation,’’ directed by Jonze’s ex-wife Sofia Coppola — was brought in as a replacement. Phoenix fed her lines in some scenes on a recording stage, and the actor redubbed part of his own performance with Johansson in mind, the magazine reported. However they did it, she’s great.