Woody Allen

Blue Jasmine (2013)

André Crous

In this captivating Woody Allen dramedy, a penniless former socialite has to learn the hard way that the whole world no longer dances to her every whim.

blue-jasmineUSA
4*

Director:
Woody Allen
Screenwriter:
Woody Allen
Director of Photography:
Javier Aguirresarobe

Running time: 100 minutes

Blue Jasmine differs in two important ways from most of Woody Allen’s films. The first difference is that the film does not primarily have comedic intentions. Although it has many moments of humour, some of them sure to elicit roaring laughter from the viewer, it is a drama filled with tension. The other difference is that it is actually a great film.

While not a thriller like his 2005 film, Match Point, which involved adultery and murder, Blue Jasmine has its fair share of suspense — the product of a very careful balancing act between the past and the present. Allen constantly flashes between the current state of affairs, when Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is sharing a tiny apartment with her sister in San Francisco, and the past, when Jasmine was living a life of vast riches for more than a decade with her businessman husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin).

In the film’s very first scene, we find Jasmine in a first-class seat talking the ear off the passenger next to her. At first, she seems to be talkative, but as the scene progresses from airplane to airport terminal to baggage claim, and Jasmine doesn’t let her interlocutor get a word in, we realise she is delivering a monologue and is entirely self-obsessed.

In fact, at many points in the film she doesn’t even need an ear to listen to her; she is content to simply deliver her speeches or comebacks, many of them in response to characters or situations from the past, all on her own.

Having lived an opulent life style for as long as she can remember, and never having worked in her life, Jasmine (real name Jeanette) is completely blind to the lives and needs of the rest of the country, including those of her adopted sister, Ginger, who lives in San Francisco, works as a grocery store clerk and couldn’t care less about who Louis Vuitton is.

Jasmine is a vapid piece of work whose condescension is only equalled by her complete ignorance of how the other 99 percent lives. She sees the world in shades of green and gold and has no sense whatsoever of the kinds of challenges that confront people who do not have the comfort of being kept and cared for by their well-to-do spouses.

Much of this ignorance is self-imposed, we learn, because learning the truth about the origin of the money may be too risky, for it could too easily upset the comfy status quo. Until recently, Jasmine’s life had consisted of the one dinner party after the other, all of them filled with dull conversations about money, investments, fancy restaurants and important diplomats.

When it all came crashing down, Jasmine had a nervous breakdown, and that is where we find her at the beginning of the film. She seems to have the right intention to make something of herself, but the arrogance that defined her life in Manhattan follows her wherever she goes in San Francisco and reveals her as being untethered to reality.

The film has a very clear purpose in divvying itself up into present and past tenses: to fill in the blanks as we need them, to indicate Jasmine’s frame of mind, to create a sense of tension as we come to understand we do not know as much as we thought we did, and to make us take notice of the carbon copy that her present life is of her husband’s while they were married. The irony of the latter point is visible to everyone except Jasmine, although there is still a final twist that gives an enormous amount of clarity and texture to her character and to the film.

Blanchett’s portrayal of the bored Manhattan housewife/professional socialite is breath-taking and should be lauded for never making us bored or for alienating us, despite the near impossibility of empathising with her self-inflicted predicament. Blanchett reverts to the Mid-Atlantic accent she deployed so well as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator and in an instant conveys an ennui we never feel for the film. The scenes she has with her two nephews are priceless.

The deception that goes along with making money is not a new topic, but the double whammy of being hurt by such deception and becoming used to it is a very potent combination for a film that is rich in colour and slowly builds to a climax that is entirely necessary though not necessarily cathartic.

Along with Match Point, this is Woody Allen’s most satisfying film since the early 1990s and is enough to beg the question why he doesn’t make serious films more often.

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.

Irrational Man (2015)

André Crous

An alcoholic philosopher decides to try his hand at committing what he believes to be an ethical murder, but the execution is neither comical nor tragic.

irrational manUSA
3*

Director:
Woody Allen
Screenwriter:
Woody Allen
Director of Photography:
Darius Khondji

Running time: 95 minutes

Woody Allen likes to play it safe in all of his recent films. This safety, while often peppered with hilarious dialogue or neurotic characters teetering on the brink of hysteria, also makes many of his works, at least those of the past 20 years, mediocre and forgettable. There have been demonstrable exceptions, particularly when his actresses are given free rein to express themselves, or when he takes greater pains to construct a story with both a beating heart and a strong head.

For the former, the examples that come to mind are the hot-blooded whirlwind performance of Penélope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Cate Blanchett’s stunning portrayal of a narcissistic, delusional, alcoholic divorcée in Blue Jasmine; the latter include Mighty Aphrodite, which borrows from both George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and ancient Greek plays, as well as his magnificent Crime and Punishment-inspired Match Point.

Irrational Man is not a comedy and does not elicit a single laugh from the audience. In theme, it is closest to Match Point, replete with Dostoyevsky references (a copy of The Idiot lies next to his bed, he scribbles in a copy of Crime and Punishment, and the Russian novelist’s name is explicitly cited in a discussion with a student), but unlike his 2005 film, there is no thrill and no tension. Even the film’s most dramatic moment – a murder – is devoid of anxiety, and while the homicidal act takes place onscreen, the death occurs off-screen.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Abe Lucas, an alcoholic philosophy professor who has just joined the faculty at Braylin College in the sleepy town of Newport, Rhode Island. He is a nihilist who believes philosophy can do little more but talk about life’s problems. Nonetheless, Allen gives us a CliffsNotes introduction to existentialist philosophers in Lucas’s classes and then proceeds to the much more dramatically satisfying situation that serves as the plot’s turning point: Lucas decides that he can give meaning to his life by helping someone in need, even if this means he would have to commit murder.

One day in a coffee shop, he overhears a woman complaining of a judge who will very likely take custody of her children away from her and give it to her ex-husband, who is friendly with the judge. Lucas, without knowing much more than what he discovers from this one-sided account, makes up his mind to kill the judge.

The other track on which the story advances involves one of Lucas’s students, Jill Pollard (Emma Stone), who has fallen in love with him despite her having a long-term, caring boyfriend. Jill is a terribly disappointing character, as much for Allen as for Stone, who has played much stronger women in the past (her attention-grabbing turn in Easy A immediately comes to mind). In Irrational Man, she starts off as a smart philosophy major who takes on her professor’s worldview head-on but very quickly becomes doe-eyed and infatuated with him, and she tries her best to lull him out of his rudderless existence. When she fails, she flings her body at him.

This is a terrible debasement and does not endear her character to the audience at all, particularly because we feel she has given up control of her life to a man who is tossing and turning in a wasteland of despair.

The mentions of the philosophers are little more than padding and serve little purpose other than to remind us Lucas is philosophically minded. The look of the film, as is usual in an Allen production, is competent without drawing any attention to itself. The single exception, however, is absolutely stunning and underscores the skills of master cinematographer Darius Khondji, for whom this film marks his fifth collaboration with Allen.

Towards the end of the film, when Jill is starting to suspect Lucas has had a hand in the death of the judge, she watches him alone out on a jetty, a silhouette against the radiant sunlight reflecting off the still water. But there is something unusual: Lucas’s silhouette seems to vibrate, even melt, around the edges where it meets the bright luminosity behind it. The shot is breathtaking and catapults the film’s visual language into the stratosphere, albeit momentarily.

This Woody Allen film is about as unfunny a movie as he has ever made. But unlike some of his other films, which at least worked still played with our emotions, this one lacks the vocabulary to get us roaring with laughter or our adrenaline pumping. Despite the intriguing premise of ending a life to infuse your own with meaning and intensity, this work is mostly forgettable, and the weak character portrayed by Emma Stone is very unfortunate.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

André Crous

USA
3*

Director:
Woody Allen
Screenwriter:
Woody Allen
Director of Photography:
Vilmos Zsigmond

Running time: 98 minutes

Another year, another film from the neurotic New Yorker. The extraordinarily prolific Woody Allen is back in London, after the enjoyable but forgettable interlude that was Whatever Works. “Enjoyable but forgettable” seems to be a very appropriate way to qualify his recent films. In fact, the narrator of his most recent film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, admits that the story is all “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. And indeed it is.

As usual, the cast is a veritable smorgasbord of talent: Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas and Gemma Jones are all delightful to watch. And Lucy Punch, representing a cross-section of the cheaper side of East London, is as fantastic as her character is grating.

Having recently separated, Alfie and Helena (Hopkins and Jones) go their own ways: Alfie ends up marrying a prostitute (Punch), while Helena blindly follows the advice of a clairvoyant who can’t see beyond Helena’s own desires and her pocketbook. Meanwhile, Sally (Watts), the daughter of Alfie and Helena, starts to work at an art gallery and gradually falls in love with her boss (Banderas), while her husband Roy (Brolin) is struggling to finish his latest novel and regularly sneaks a peek through the rear window at a young woman on the other side of the courtyard.

There are misunderstandings, no lack of lust, and a risky measure of self-delusion on the part of many of the characters, and it is good fun to watch the stew come to a boil. But the stories branch out in every direction and I’ve grown tired of Allen’s jazz soundtrack, which attracts too much attention. Also, it is perhaps a sign of Allen’s auteur sensibility that his films all look the same in spite of having different DoPs on every production, but with a cameraman like Vilmos Zsigmond at the helm, I would have expected a look that is a little more risky. No such luck.

The film is lukewarm at best and while it is a nice temperature for this relaxing 100-minute distraction, it is hardly worth remembering and will be all but forgotten by the time his next film rolls round – which should be any day now.