The most embarrassing monologue of Morgan Freeman’s career: “Are you familiar with the Shmoo?”
It’s mad to think that Morgan Freeman was 30 years into his stage and screen career before anybody realised that his distinctively sonorous and syrupy voice was perfectly suited to voiceovers and narrations.
The actor didn’t wake up one day and decide he was going to craft one of the most soothing cadences in cinema history, but for whatever reason, no filmmaker in the industry hired him to weaponise it in the recording booth. The man could read the phonebook and make it sound captivating, yet it wasn’t until The Shawshank Redemption that Freeman got his first shot at narration.
It remains one of his most distinctive voice-only contributions, and it kicked down the doors, opened the floodgates, and gave rise to a subgenre. The Academy Award-winning veteran has since gone on to narrate a weird and wonderful array of projects, ranging from Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and March of the Penguins to The Mona Lisa Myth and Netflix’s Life On Our Planet.
It isn’t just narration either; Freeman’s lyrical syntax also makes him a perfect delivery system for a verbose monologue. Sometimes, it can come across as self-indulgent when a screenwriter pens a lengthy exchange that requires one actor’s character to hold the audience’s attention for an extended period of time, but there are few who’ve mastered the art of cinematic soliloquy better than Freeman.
Still, giving him the words to say doesn’t automatically make them worth saying, as proven by his woeful diatribe in Lucky Number Slevin. Director Paul McGuigan’s twisty 2006 crime thriller is one of those movies that constantly feels like it’s trying far too hard to be cool, with writer Jason Smilovic’s script arriving a decade too late to the faux-Tarantino craze that swept independent cinema.
Josh Hartnett’s protagonist enters a room wearing nothing but a towel, where Freeman’s character known only as ‘The Boss’ tries his hardest to descend a staircase as threateningly as possible, with his opening line referencing an animated figure that resembles a bowling pin with legs that first appeared in a 1948 comic strip: “Are you familiar with the Shmoo, Mr Fisher?”
“The Shmoo was a loveable creature, really,” he intones. “Laid eggs, gave milk, and died of sheer ecstasy when looked at with hunger. The Shmoo loved to be eaten. It could taste like any food you desire. Shmoo hide, cut thin, made fine leather. Even Shmoo whiskers made excellent toothpicks. In essence, the Shmoo supplied all of the world’s wants. I only bring up the case of the Shmoo because of its relevance to you.”
Writing elaborate monologues based on obscure pop culture references had gone out of fashion long before the mid-2000s, and it’s clear the script thought it was cute and clever. Instead, even with Freeman doing his best to inject some gravitas into the dialogue, it’s a cringeworthy example of the damage Tarantino inadvertently caused to genre cinema.
In the grand scheme of things, the Shmoo has fuck all to do with what Freeman is actually talking about; it’s just there for the screenwriter to pat themselves on the back. Without a doubt, it’s the worst use of Freeman’s greatest asset, and there’s a high chance he had absolutely no idea what a Shmoo was when he was saying it.
