Woody Allen (2013)
In Blue Jasmine, which draws considerably on A Streetcar Named Desire, the protagonist Jasmine tells people repeatedly that ‘Blue Moon’ was playing the first time she met the man who became her husband. It’s not hard to see where Woody Allen got this song from: the stage directions for Streetcar include a ‘blue piano’, heard at several points of the play, and Blanche Dubois’s voice sings ‘Paper Moon’ from the bathtub as Stanley Kowalski tells his wife Stella the truth about Blanche’s sexual past. ‘Blue Moon’ has been a standard pretty well since Rodgers and Hart wrote it in the mid-1930s so it’s entirely possible that it accompanied Jasmine’s introduction to high-flying New York businessman Hal Francis around the turn of the millennium. Even so, this choice of song hints at the superficial and rather musty quality of Woody Allen’s reworking of Tennessee Williams. Jasmine’s fall from social grace followed the global financial crisis of 2008 and multi-millionaire Hal’s exposure as a crook; this makes Blue Jasmine seem topical but the updating is half-hearted. That Rodgers and Hart could have been playing when Hal met Jasmine doesn’t alter the fact there’s no way in Woody Allen’s universe that a contemporary best-seller like Cher’s ‘Believe’ (a title that obviously resonates more strongly with ‘Paper Moon’ and the themes of Streetcar) would be allowed to provide the soundtrack to that first date.
Hal goes to jail and hangs himself there. The newly-impoverished Jasmine, needing to get back on her feet and a job, goes west and a long way downmarket to stay in San Francisco with her younger sister Ginger and her two sons. (Jasmine and Ginger are not biological siblings: both had the same adoptive parents.) The details and situations that Woody Allen creates here, and on which he depends for jokes and pathos, are variously improbable. The question of whether Blanche Dubois is the character’s real name in Williams’s play is almost beside the point because the name expresses her fantasy of who she would like to be, and because fantasy is integral to her being; Jasmine began life as Jeanette but, she says, changed her name to something less unremarkable. But Jasmine is remarkable in the wrong way: it sounds too crudely glamorous for someone whose social ambition is carefully calculated and steeped in anxiety. After her world collapsed, Jasmine had a nervous breakdown; she still talks to herself aloud in public, and people stop and stare or, if she sits next to someone on a park bench, move away quickly. The latter is believable but surely not the former in a big city of today, where many people appear to be talking to themselves and a passer-by doesn’t stop to check if they’re using technology that you can’t see at first glance. (Besides, people on mobiles that you can see often seem to be emoting in a soap opera world of their own.)
Woody Allen relies on A Streetcar Named Desire when it suits – Jasmine ends up ready to be sectioned – but the structure of Blue Jasmine is very different from that of its source. Allen moves between San Francisco in the present and New York in the recent past to explain the backstory but the flashbacks don’t contain anything revelatory. He’s very casual too in how he moves things forward. Sometimes, this is through a simply improbable event (the intervention of ‘fate’ in Match Point was a pretext for lazy plotting and Allen now seems happy to adopt it as standard practice). Ginger and her then husband Augie visit Jasmine and Hal in New York; as they sit in a cab, with Augie asleep, Ginger happens to see Hal on a street corner snogging another woman – a friend of Jasmine’s called Raylene. At the climax to the film, Augie turns up at just the right moment to thwart Jasmine – bumping into her outside a San Francisco jeweller’s, he exposes the lies she’s told to the wealthy man who’s about to buy her an engagement ring. Sometimes, what happens just doesn’t make sense in terms of the character concerned. Ginger and Augie, after winning two hundred thousand dollars on the lottery, come to New York to seek Hal’s advice on Augie’s setting up his own business. The plot requires that instead Hal invests the lottery winnings, which disappear entirely, but it’s Jasmine who encourages this investment: it seems unlikely that such an insecure, status-conscious woman would be able to take pleasure in the poor relations striking it lucky or would want them to augment their bank balance. Jasmine is irritated that Ginger’s and Augie’s visit coincides with her birthday party – a major social event: you’d think she’d spend as little time as possible with her sister at the party but she and Ginger have a tête à tête long enough for Ginger to express concerns about Raylene and plant seeds of doubt in Jasmine’s mind.
It seems that each time a new Woody Allen movie appears some critics praise it as a ‘return to form’ and his ‘best in years’. This is no doubt an expression of the peculiar mixture of admiration and affection which he inspires (he now seems to have served his time for the Soon-Yi Previn affair and regarding sexual abuse allegations[1]). He’s clearly no longer able to produce consistently good work – for each Midnight in Paris there’s a To Rome with Love, for each Whatever Works a You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – and no new Allen film that I’ve seen in the last ten years or so is as rich as Hannah and Her Sisters or Husbands and Wives or Sweet and Lowdown. It’s enough for me that his work contains as much good stuff as the best of it still does – and it’s easy to feel grateful for things that don’t make complete sense in the context of the movie, or which merely repeat what he’s often done well before. The quality of colour and light in Blue Jasmine, photographed by Javier Aguirresarobe, is lovely – whether in Jasmine’s New York halcyon days or in the hard times of San Francisco (and, although Ginger’s apartment is tiny compared with the vast spaces of Jasmine’s former habitats, it looks ‘homey’ in a less pejorative sense than Jasmine intends when she passes judgment on it). Woody Allen’s use of a jazz soundtrack here – highlighted by ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find’, sung by Lizzie Miles – is more pointedly apt than usual but it’s nonetheless effective. And as you’re watching Blue Jasmine – at least until the closing stages when the laboured working out of the story starts to intrude – its limitations are almost entirely obscured by the actors. One of the most dismaying features of To Rome with Love was the casting but, in this respect at least, Woody Allen has recovered his touch.
Even when a character in Blue Jasmine is obviously drawn, the actor gives it texture. As Hal, Alec Baldwin combines a mirthless smile with a wolfish intensity – he persuades you that his in-laws would notice only the surface affability when they first meet. The repressed dentist whose receptionist Jasmine is reduced to working as – until he comes on strong to her among the filing cabinets – is not a simply ridiculous figure, thanks to Michael Stuhlbarg’s empathetic playing. (Jasmine, who fancies the idea of getting an online qualification as an interior decorator once she’s learned how to use a computer, is unsurprisingly inept at office work: her exchanges with patients who test her skills and patience are funny even though Woody Allen may have written these dialogues in his sleep.) All the men in Ginger’s life – her ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), her new boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale), a man she meets at a party and with whom she briefly has an affair (Louis CK), and her two overweight sons (Daniel Jenks and Max Rutherford) – are well played. Cannavale, with his easy carnality and emotional volatility, is particularly good. Peter Sarsgaard is splendid as the affluent would-be congressman whom Jasmine nearly lands: his shock when he finds out who she really is combines hurt with a shocked awareness of what a political liability she could have turned out to be. Max Casella (Chili’s pal), Tammy Blanchard (another of Jasmine’s New York friends) and Alden Ehrenreich (Hal’s son) all do well – although the character Allen has written for the last-named is particularly monotonous. As Ginger, Sally Hawkins is, once again, excellent. Hawkins is so true as someone unsure of herself – Ginger continues to be influenced by Jasmine’s superior ‘taste’, and finds a man who flatters her a beguiling novelty – that she nearly overcomes the mechanical quality of this sub-plot. She and Bobby Cannavale are such a likeable couple that I was glad Allen gave Ginger and Chili a happier ending than Williams gave Stanley and Stella.
Cate Blanchett, however, is in all respects the star of Blue Jasmine. She played Blanche Dubois in the Sydney Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 2009 and no doubt she’s drawn on that experience for this role but Blanchett’s socially precise portrait of Jasmine, unlike Allen’s screenplay, is largely convincing as de nos jours. Her handling of the abundant dialogue (an impression augmented for me by seeing the movie in Ghent, with French and Flemish subtitles on the screen!) is effortlessly varied, in vocal as well as emotional range. Her slim, leggy elegance makes her the perfect physical embodiment of the character too. Blanchett looks so goldenly beautiful when Jasmine’s riding socially high that you might regret her downfall if she didn’t look marvellous in reduced circumstances too (and this isn’t just because Jasmine continues to be extravagant when she can no longer afford to be). Blanchett achieves brilliantly the crossover from egocentric Jasmine’s talking about herself to mentally unstable Jasmine’s talking to herself. She creates a person about whom you’re genuinely ambivalent: the neurotic impulse that underlies and finds expression in Jasmine’s snobbishness and selfishness makes you feel as sorry for her as you’re alienated by her. Blue Jasmine is thoroughly entertaining and absorbing: this is partly due to the fluency of Woody Allen’s direction but it’s due mostly to Blanchett. There were times when I felt Allen was depending on the kindness of those who knew A Streetcar Named Desire to lend substance to his take on it; and Tennessee Williams’s play is so much about pretence and make-believe that Allen’s dramatisation of Jasmine’s descent into craziness seems unimaginative. ‘I don’t want realism, I want magic!’ insists Blanche Dubois. Woody Allen doesn’t supply either in this film but Cate Blanchett, in no small measure, delivers both.
5 September 2013
[1] Afternote: Years after-note … I was wrong about that!
