Hating Scarlett Johansson

SOMETIMES the Broadway thing doesn't work out for movie actresses. Like poor Julia Roberts in "Three Days of Rain" four years ago. Like dear Sienna Miller in "After Miss Julie" last fall, giving a performance that could best be reviewed as well dressed. Now there's Catherine Zeta-Jones's performance in the revival of "A Little Night Music." As one out-of-town theatergoer summed it up, when asked how he liked the show, "That girl sure is good-looking."

This sort of thing is a blessing to regular people, really. For a few minutes (as long as the reviews echo in our ears), we get to feel a little sorry for the grand and glorious icons of screen and tabloid. It comforts us a bit, forgetting briefly that they have more of just about everything than we do or ever will.

Then someone like Scarlett Johansson (above) comes along. And stars in "A View From the Bridge" at the Cort Theater. Playing a pretty young thing -- but with brown hair, to show she's serious -- more than admired by her uncle (the outstanding, outstanding Liev Schreiber), she not only doesn't make a fool of herself; she knocks it out of the park.

Scarlett is probably a perfectly lovely human being. She certainly did a nice job in the movie "The Horse Whisperer" when she was 14, playing an adolescent traumatized by a riding accident. But then she grew up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she was great in "Lost in Translation" too.

My feud with Scarlett (and she knows nothing about it -- I've been just that discreet) began with an interview she did almost seven years ago for the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times. Chatting with Virginia Heffernan, our Scarlett, age 18, shared her wisdom about relationships between the sexes and concluded that older men needed and should turn to younger women while older women were "dying from the inside," her charming term for menopause. For details, see No. 5 below.

It's O.K. to hate Scarlett Johansson. She has everything. It's like hating the Parisians. Because they and we know that they have the best food, the best wine, the most confident style, the most beautiful language, the most beautiful city and more of things we aren't even sophisticated enough to want, hatred is allowed.

10 Good Reasons to Despise and Resent
Young Scarlett Johannson, Miss Perfect

1. She's 25.

2. She's drop-dead gorgeous, and 80 percent of that gorgeousness comes from a frightening level of self-confidence.

3. She's married to the hunky Ryan Reynolds (since the fall of 2008).

4. She won best actress awards from BAFTA and the Venice Film Festival when she was 18.

5. She's enthusiastic about romances between older men and much younger woman. As she told Heffernan in The Times: "Men have no aid to tell them that they're getting older. They just see their bodies decaying. A young, fertile, fruitful woman can help you across the bridge." (Notice, gentlemen, how she cleverly switches to second person.)

6. She's made an acting style out of looking helpless and baffled. And it works.

7. She's gotten devastatingly good reviews for "A View From the Bridge." Ben Brantley wrote in The Times that she "melts into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity disappears."

8. She deserved them.

9. She has the colossal nerve to complain that she's tired. From doing eight shows a week. Like every other Broadway actor and actress. "I'm really a shell of my former self," she told reporters. "It is exhausting. I actually can't quite express how exhausting it is."

10. She even manages to get a little of our sympathy, because, remember, she's just a kid. Just a helpless, baffled kid.

"A View From the Bridge," by Arthur Miller, directed by Gregory Mosher. Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street, (212) 239-6200.