REVIEW: Blue Jasmine (2013)

Blue Jasmine is Woody Allen’s 45^th feature film and arguably his first to deal with the contemporary world in any real way. It is also his best-reviewed film in quite a while with most of the praise going to Cate Blanchett’s lead performance.

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is down on her luck. Once rich and married to successful businessman Hal (Alec Baldwin), she lived a full and vacuous life as one of the 1% in New York’s affluent Park Avenue. Following Hal’s arrest for all sorts of business fraud, Jasmine is left alone and broke. After a nervous breakdown, she moves to San Francisco to live with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who she has had little to do with since childhood. The film follows her as she tries to get used to working for a meagre living and as she tries get again to snare a rich husband. Meanwhile, she constantly berates her sister for her lack of ambition and choice in men – taking a particular dislike to Ginger’s fiancé Chili (Bobby Cannavale).

As is evident, Allen is in a sombre mood, making a serious film for the first time since the grim but interesting 2010 film You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. The film begins with Jasmine at a very low point in her life and only briefly lightens up along the way, the drama heightened by frequent, well-integrated flashbacks of Jasmine’s time with Hal. These flashbacks are always introduced seamlessly into the narrative and frequently comment on the action, Allen’s movement between these modes displaying again his editorial skills as both a writer and director. The film unfolds well, saving certain backstory revelations until they can have their strongest, or cruellest, effect – particularly when it reveals what happened Hal after his arrest and why Ginger and her ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) detest him so much. As is often the case, Allen shows himself to be a fantastic storyteller, very much aware of when to come in and out of a scene and displaying a deft hand at exposition, nuance, character and music. The use of “Blue Moon” as a symbol of Jasmine’s traumatic disconnect from a highly romanticised past is perfect and, in the final scene, simply but powerfully moving. Jasmine is not a nice character but Blanchett’s incisive performance and Allen’s equally insightful script make her human and thoroughly understandable.

The film’s main problem lies in its contemporary relevance. Allen has thus far largely avoided making points on current affairs, making films that, at their best, feel effortlessly timeless. A film like Shadows and Fog is able to reach a large degree of theological and philosophical depth precisely because it has no contemporary relevance whatsoever and oftentimes Allen’s best films work in a similar vacuum. Similarly Blue Jasmine is thwarted slightly by a representation of the working class San Franciscans that is all beer, vests and sports on TV and not much of a stretch from Danny Aiello’s detestable, abusive Monk in The Purple Rose of Cairo. But while Monk was a character from the 1930s, Augie and Chili merely feel anachronistically like characters from the same decade. Allen has made a career of mocking the characteristics and peccadilloes of privileged pseudo-intellectual New Yorkers and it is admirable that he is trying to show the 99% for once. It is just a pity that he does not invest these characters with any depth. Augie and Chili too often feel like caricatures (something Allen often opts for too easily) and when they do not, it is easy to suspect that this is thanks more to Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Cannavale than to Woody Allen. Here, like Jasmine, Allen might have found himself in a world he does not understand.

Though itself tainted by Jasmine’s snobbery, Blue Jasmine is nonetheless a well-made drama with uniformly good performances and a further example of Allen’s talent for writing quick and believable scripts and directing complex and interesting dramas.


See also:
Midnight in Paris
To Rome With Love

REVIEW: Submarine (2011)

  Submarine comes with a lot of critical kudos, particularly for its director, Richard Ayoade, best known for playing Moss in “The IT Crowd”, though his best work remains “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace”, the hilarious though short-lived spoof ‘80s horror series which he starred in, co-wrote and directed. Submarine sees his first venture into filmmaking, though it is equally packed with allusions, particularly to the French New Wave and the films of Wes Anderson.

  Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is one of those odd teenagers, who reads the dictionary, uses a briefcase instead of a schoolbag and imagines a documentary film crew is following him around, watching his every move. The film essentially follows Oliver through his situation, subjectively with his own voiceover and objectively with a largely distant camera. Oliver gets into a difficult relationship with Jordana (Yasmin Paige), a girl in his class who hates anything emotional, as well as becoming embroiled in the marital strife of his parents Jill and Lloyd (Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor). He suspects that his mother is having an affair with spiritual guru Graham Purvis (a caricature by Paddy Considine), and takes on the task of saving his parent’s marriage.

  The film feels like it should be great, filled with Ayoade’s own brand of idiosyncratic humour and several technical innovations with a distinctive nouvelle vague feel. However, the film is very wet. The numerous references to older films feel like direct quotations, enlisted only to charm nostalgic film critics while Oliver’s own ruminations don’t feel particularly new. As in Wes Anderson’s deeply flawed work, the film starts of whimsical and fun, but it isn’t long before you realize that you don’t like anyone in the film. Oliver is a figure of fun, one who is strange and easy to laugh at but, crucially, not with. As a protagonist, he is very much a dull subject and it isn’t hard to picture his imagined documentary film crew packing up in defeat.

  His romance with Yasmin is handled rather lazily with the prerequisite love-hate relationship giving way to something more affecting. However, Ayoade is so clearly trying his hardest to avoid sentimentality, as if having Jordana hate anything romantic makes up for the obviously subjectively fanciful fireworks and Super-8 footage sequences. Ultimately, the film noticeably pulls itself apart, trying too hard to be cynical and knowing when it really wants to just bask in the joys of classic Hollywood romance. The same can be said for the subplot involving Oliver’s parents, scenes which are so stilted and repressed that it becomes extremely hard to care whether his parents ever grow up. Hawkins and Taylor give performances that are so immobile that you wonder whether they aren’t just cardboard cutouts of Angry Mum and Upset Dad. As for Paddy Considine’s role, his Purvis is so over the top that it feels part of a different, less self-conscious, film. The fact that the film avoids anything sentimental so desperately but allows a character so overtly unreal marks the complete ambivalence of Submarine. In the end, one wonders what Ayoade really wanted to achieve with a film too apologetic to be moving and too histrionic to be sincere.

  The lasting impression is one of misanthropy. It has been quite a while that a film has presented such a broad range of unlikeable characters, possibly since one of Wes Anderson’s films. It isn’t that the characters are horrible or self-serving; it is simply that they are so devoid of life that you really wonder why you are wasting your time in their company.