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"  There&amp;#039;s a part in Jonathan Glazer&amp;#039;s Under The Skin where, without giving anything away, Scarlett Johannson walks completely naked through a black void. You are not watching The Sexiest Woman Alive, nor the movie star you know and love. Instead, you are essentially watching a fly get caught in a spider&amp;#039;s web, and it&amp;#039;s one of the most breathtaking performances I&amp;#039;ve seen in long, long time. It reminded me a lot of Jack Nicholson&amp;#039;s career-changing turn in The Shining, a comparison that might seem like a stretch until you look at it a bit more closely. You might not put the two actors together, but their careers were both in need of a change before taking roles (on first glance, anyway) in lower budget but higher-concept thrillers.  Let&amp;#039;s look at what Scarlett did before Under The Skin. She voiced the operating system in Her, which was equally as singular and incredible \u2013 albeit in a totally different way. Before Under The Skin, though,there&amp;#039;s four or six years of mostly middling mainstream material. The Avengers and Iron Man 2 were rad for what they were, but ultimately just popcorn flicks. He&amp;#039;s Just Not That Into You was a rom-com that was neither rom nor com. You have to go all the way back to Woody Allen&amp;#039;s Vicky Christina Barcelona in 2008 for a Scarlett role worth remembering.  With Nicholson, there was five years of schlock between his Oscar winning performance in One Flew Over The Cuckoo&amp;#039;s Nest and The Shining. This is when he did the infamous-by-very-definition The Missouri Breaks, which tanked (although it cemented the friendship between Brando and Nicholson). Jack spent two years doing very little until The Shining came along. Leaving behind the cuddly rebel image, it was one of the first Nicholson performances that made you fear him, not root for him. He&amp;#039;s one of the most charming on-screen presences in modern film, but in The Shining you spent 90 minutes scared shitless of not just what he does but what he might do.  The same is true of Johannson in Skin. Your eyes stayed glued to her as she walks the streets of Glasgow like an ogre going through puberty, seemingly unsure of her own body and completely aware of it at the same time. It&amp;#039;s hard to talk about the movie without giving some of the plot away, but look for a key scene that takes place on the beach. Look at the way she moves through the breaking waves. She moves in an entirely straight line through the breaking waves (while wearing heels! on a pebble beach!) as if she were a shark honing in. Throughout the movie she uses her body like an animal, the aforementioned shark and spider come to mind, giving the men she seduces what they want in order to lead them on (and in) but there is no joy in any of it. Her hips move from side to side, her curves are still oh-so-very real, but her eyes are cold and her femininity is barely there at all. She is quite literally walking as if she were death itself. And she may very well be.  The Shining provided Nicholson with a much needed career boost as well as some much-needed scope. He was no longer boxed in by his iconoclastic winking tabloid-playboy routine (which, by 1980, was starting to wear a little thin). Post Shining he was suddenly able to play a whole new range of characters, from complete and total bastards (Batman, A Few Good Men, even The Witches Of Eastwick) to thoughtful and progressive bastards (Terms Of Endearment, As Good As It Gets, About Schmidt). As The Shining&amp;#039;s profile grew from a modest box office success to cult movie legend to its rightful place as a modern horror classic, so did our view of Nicholson. It afforded him something entirely priceless in Hollywood: freedom to be himself and do whatever the fuck he wanted. He got to be &amp;quot;Jack.&amp;quot; So much so that he&amp;#039;s been able to coast on the &amp;quot;Jack&amp;quot; image for the last 20 years. Not that that&amp;#039;s a bad thing. Not at all.  Thanks to Under the Skin, Scarlett Johannson may have the same opportunity. We&amp;#039;ve known since the underrated The Girl With The Pearl Earring that she could get into the head of any character. Now she&amp;#039;s proven to be a master of physicality as well. Under The Skin couldn&amp;#039;t come at a better time for the 29-year-old with three less-than-ambitious films coming out next (Chef, a winsome-looking food truck comedy, Lucy, a big-budget action movie, and another installment of The Avengers franchise). Her script choices moving forward will show us whether she&amp;#039;ll go down in history as a legend like Jack, or simply as an excellent actress with uncommon range, which she undoubtedly possesses. We know very well that she can play roles ranging from superheroes to sex kittens, from manic-pixie-dream-girls to whatever the hell she was in Ghost World. This year, she&amp;#039;s wowed us with not only a voice-only performance (Her) but also one that is defined by how she moves, not speaks. There is no reason to question whether she has the ability to be a true movie legend like Jack, only the question of whether she wants to.  Either way, she will have had the last laugh with her performance in Skin. With sexy-looking trailers and posters, there will undoubtedly be dudes going into Under The Skin \u2013 as there were at the screening I attended \u2013 who are simply looking to see &amp;quot;that chick from The Avengers&amp;quot; get naked (actual words spoken by an actual guy two seats down from me). She gives them that, for sure. But all of those men at my screening left the theater with their dicks between their legs, very confused. This was not the &amp;quot;hot alien&amp;quot; movie they signed up for. Here&amp;#039;s my theory: Scarlett was happy to disappoint them, because she wants to be so much more to the rest of us. What those guys wanted was some T&amp;amp;amp;A. Instead, they got to witness a fucking revelation.   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a28334/scarlett-johannson-under-the-skin-shining/>