She couldn’t stop babbling about her life.

Blue Jasmine

(2013)

If there’s one are where Woody Allen is generally reliable, even when the quality of his movies dips, its eliciting great performances from his ready and willing actors. That’s never been truer than with Blue Jasmine, a film in which the lead performance far eclipses the quality of the screenplay. Cate Blanchett wholly deserves her Oscar, and raises the surrounding picture several levels as a result.

A fair amount of discussion has been generated by the possible inspirations for this story of a New York socialite (Jeanette/Jasmine; Blanchett) who moves to San Francisco to live with her struggling blue collar sister Ginger after the bottom falls out of her marriage and financial affairs. How much is this Allen taking his cues from A Streetcar Named Desire (Jasmine as Blanche and Ginger as Stella)? I’m not familiar enough with the play to pass judgement, although there are certainly superficial similarities. And how much of Jasmine (the character) is Woody channelling his malign view of Mia Farrow into fiction; a fragile, unstable, self-deluding egoist, so shrill and unpleasant only a saint wouldn’t be able to tolerate her obnoxious superiority. I hadn’t aware of the widespread rallying behind this view beforehand, but it was one of the first things that occurred to me about her.

We only see hubby Hal (Alec Baldwin) in flashbacks to their luxury lifestyle. He was a rich financier, but his fraudulent activities led to his arrest, imprisonment and suicide. Dragged down with him were the one-time only savings, a lottery win, of Ginger (Sally Hawkins) and her then husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay). As a result Ginger’s friends and family aren’t overly keen on Jasmine, considering her at best to have turned a blind eye to Hal’s misdeeds, but Ginger has sympathy for her as a victim of his philandering. The greatest immediate impact on Jasmine is a mental collapse. We first see her talking to herself by way of a reluctant passenger on a plane journey, and we can only sympathise with the elderly woman when she makes a break for it at the luggage reclamation point.

Jasmine’s undisguised disdain for the poverty of her new surroundings and the insufferable snobbery she shows to those she considers lower on the pecking order than her, is underlined by her jaundiced attitude to Ginger and her fiancé Chili (Bobby Cannavale, fortunately less apoplectic than in Boardwalk Empire, but still a tinderbox). She makes no effort to fit in or empathise. Why should she? She never had to before. So Jasmine carries her world of delusion into this new one, rehearsing past glories and events (in which we see her wilful blindness towards her husband’s behaviour and the slipping veil that she was completely ignorant of what he was up to in business affairs; it suited her to ignore it), fancifully holding out the idea that she can become an interior designer, and even worse spiralling into a doomed relationship with a rich widower (Peter Sarsgaard); one propped up on a succession of lies she just cant help from telling. Throughout this she is constantly popping pills, an abject, semi-functioning alcoholic. Her life is a bipolar car crash.

Little on the page is likely to endear you to Jasmine. This is a merciless character assassination from Allen, even if it is entirely unrelated to Farrow. The very occasional, brief glimmer maybe; a less caustic scene in which, progressively more trolleyed, she imparts some wisdom to her sister’s sons (which boils down to the empty life advice “Tip big, boys”). But even then, the humanity is all Blanchett’s,. That we end up feeling vaguely sorry for her, and the hopeless mess she has made of hers and others’ lives (including that of her stepson) makes her Oscar warranted thrice over.

There's something rather mean-spirited about this picture in general. Evident are the same kind of patronising broad-strokes to Allen’s depiction of rich and poor that made an earlier venture into the realm of class boundaries such a disaster (perhaps the director’s only unintentional comedy, the plaudits it received still mystify me). Allen also takes in the financial crisis, but he may as well not have bothered; neither characters nor events feel remotely contemporary, as if they have alighted from a distant shore and time (he also seems to think everyone else in the world is as computer illiterate as he is). The poor are salt of the earth folk who earn an honest crust. Sure, they have foibles but don’t they got heart! Baldwin’s Hal, meanwhile, may as well have stepped in from his Glengarry Glen Ross cameo (in fairness, one could only really see him as an Allen substitute when he announces he is running off with a teenager). There’s no shading there, but there’s no shading anywhere.

Where one can’t hear Allen’s writing it’s because the actors somehow make the characters their own. Hawkins is very good, but Ginger is so over-familiar (the apologist sister from Hannah and Her…, just less well-to-do). Clay and Cannavale breathe life into their strutting caricatures, and Louis C.K. is winning as Ginger’s sound system salesmen suitor. The most Allen-esque character is probably Michael Stuhlbarg’s predatory dentist (“Have you ever got high on nitrous oxide?”) but he’s such a fine actor he really deserves an Allen lead.

So Allen the writer didn’t deserve his Best Screenplay Oscar nomination, but don’t forget that, besides the well-earned win for the delightful Midnight in Paris, he also got a nod for the execrable Match Point. I’ve missed a number of Allen’s pictures since the millennium turned (it would once have been unthinkable, but I suspect few of them are undiscovered gems in waiting), but this comes across as a conscious attempt to rekindle some of the existential angst of his post-Bergman ‘80s phase (remember the crumbling façade of Charlotte Rampling in the excellent Stardust Memories?)

Perhaps being back on familiar turf brings it home, but it’s more evident than ever that Allen’s got little left to say, apart from venting some unbridled bitterness. That he’s knocking 80 and still making interesting movies, however flawed, is remarkable in itself, however. He pulls off some nice touches; there’s an effective final act reveal, and an appropriate symmetry to the construction as a whole. But mainly, he’s very fortunate to have all these exemplars of acting finery just waiting for his call (although, a few may not be as giddy for it in the light of recently re-heated accusations). And in a case like this, that call is everything. Blue Jasmine is all on Blanchett. Her performance is stunning; repellent, vainglorious and tragic.

***1/2

Comments

Maybe the dingo ate your baby.

Seinfeld 2.9: The Stranded The Premise George and Elaine are stranded at a party in Long Island, with a disgruntled hostess.

Nanobots aren’t just for Christmas.

No Time to Die (2021) (SPOILERS) You know a Bond movie is in trouble when it resorts to wholesale appropriation of lines and even the theme song from another in order to “boost” its emotional heft. That No Time to Die – which previewed its own title song a year and a half before its release to resoundingly underwhelmed response, Grammys aside – goes there is a damning indictment of its ability to eke out such audience investment in Daniel Craig’s final outing as James (less so as 007). As with Spectre , the first half of No Time to Die is, on the whole, more than decent Bond fare, before it once again gets bogged down in the quest for substance and depth from a character who, regardless of how dapper his gear is, resolutely resists such outfitting.

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.

Bugsy (1991) (SPOILERS) Bugsy is very much a Warren Beatty vanity project (aren’t they all, even the ones that don’t seem that way on the surface?), to the extent of his playing a title character a decade and a half younger than him. As such, it makes sense that producer Warren’s choice of director wouldn’t be inclined to overshadow star Warren, but the effect is to end up with a movie that, for all its considerable merits (including a script from James Toback chock full of incident), never really feels quite focussed, that it’s destined to lead anywhere, even if we know where it’s going.

Big things have small beginnings.

Prometheus (2012) Post- Gladiator , Ridley Scott opted for an “All work and no pondering” approach to film making. The result has been the completion of as many movies since the turn of the Millennium as he directed in the previous twenty years. Now well into his seventies, he has experienced the most sustained period of success of his career. For me, it’s also been easily the least-interesting period. All of them entirely competently made, but all displaying the machine-tooled approach that was previously more associated with his brother.

Beer is for breakfast around here. Drink or begone.

Cocktail (1988) (SPOILERS) When Tarantino claims the 1980s (and 1950s) as the worst movie decade, I’m inclined to invite him to shut his butt down. But should he then flourish Cocktail as Exhibit A, I’d be forced to admit he has a point. Cocktail is a horrifying, malignant piece of dreck, a testament to the efficacy of persuasive star power on a blithely rapt and undiscerning audience. Not only is it morally vacuous, it’s dramatically inert. And it relies on Tom’s toothy charms to a degree that would have any sensitive soul rushed to the A&E suffering from toxic shock (Tom’s most recently displayed toothy charms will likely have even his staunchest devotees less than sure of themselves, however, as he metamorphoses into your favourite grandma). And it was a huge box office hit.

Isn’t sugar better than vinegar?

Femme Fatale (2002) (SPOILERS) Some have attempted to rescue Femme Fatale from the dumpster of critical rejection and audience indifference with the claim that it’s De Palma’s last great movie. It isn’t that by a long shot, but it might rank as the last truly unfettered display of his obsessions and sensibilities, complete with a ludicrous twist – so ludicrous, it’s either a stroke of genius or mile-long pile up.

It's something trying to get out.

The Owl Service (1969-70) I may have caught a glimpse of Channel 4’s repeat of The Owl Service in 1987, but not enough to stick in the mind. My formative experience was Alan Garner’s novel, which was read several years earlier during English lessons. Garner’s tapestry of magical-mythical storytelling had an impact, with its possession theme and blending of legend with the here and now. Garner depicts a Britain where past and present are mutable, and where there is no safety net of objective reality; life becomes a strange waking dream. His fantasy landscapes are both attractive and disturbing; the uncanny reaching out from the corners of the attic. But I have to admit that the themes of class and discrimination went virtually unnoticed in the wake of such high weirdness. The other Garner books I read saw young protagonists transported to fantasy realms. The resonance of The Owl Service came from the fragmenting of the rural normal. When the author notes that he neve

Who’s got the Figgy Port?

Loki (2021) (SPOILERS) Can something be of redeemable value and shot through with woke (the answer is: Mad Max: Fury Road )? The two attributes certainly sound essentially irreconcilable, and Loki ’s tendencies – obviously, with new improved super-progressive Kevin Feige touting Disney’s uber-agenda – undeniably get in the way of what might have been a top-tier MCU entry from realising its full potential. But there are nevertheless solid bursts of highly engaging storytelling in the mix here, for all its less cherishable motivations. It also boasts an effortlessly commanding lead performance from Tom Hiddleston; that alone puts Loki head and shoulders above the other limited series thus far.

These are not soda cans you asked me to get for you.

The Devil’s Own (1997) (SPOILERS) Naturally, a Hollywood movie taking the Troubles as a backdrop is sure to encounter difficulties. It’s the push-pull of wanting to make a big meaningful statement about something weighty, sobering and significant in the real world and bottling it when it comes to the messy intricacies of the same. So inevitably, the results invariably tend to the facile and trite. I’m entirely sure The Devil’s Own would have floundered even if Harrison Ford hadn’t come on board and demanded rewrites, but as it is, the finished movie packs a lot of talent to largely redundant end.

Did you not just hand over a chicken to someone?

The Father (2020) (SPOILERS) I was in no great rush to see The Father , expecting it to be it to be something of an ordeal in the manner of that lavishly overpraised euthanasia-fest Amour. As with the previous Oscars, though, the Best Picture nominee I saw last turned out to be the best of the bunch. In that case, Parasite , its very title beckoning the psychic global warfare sprouting shoots around it, would win the top prize. The Father , in a year of disappointing nominees, had to settle for Best Actor. Ant’s good, naturally, but I was most impressed with the unpandering manner in which Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton approached material that might easily render one highly unstuck.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog