'Blue' Rhapsodies: Woody Allen, In Need Of New Tricks

Transcript

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

At the age of 77, Woody Allen hasn't slowed down. His latest movie opens this week. It's called "Blue Jasmine" and stars Cate Blanchett as the ex-wife of a convicted investment securities tycoon who goes to live with her sister, played by Sally Hawkins. The cast includes Alec Baldwin, Louis C.K. and Andrew Dice Clay. Film critic David Edelstein has this review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: Another year, another Woody Allen picture, and few agree on whether that's a good thing. For some, he hasn't made an interesting film since "Husbands and Wives," maybe even "Hannah and Her Sisters." Others think more recent morality plays like "Match Point" and comic parables like "Midnight in Paris" prove the old dog still hunts.

I'm in the middle. I'm amazed he makes films like "Blue Jasmine" seem fresh and lively when he works in such a closed creative ecosystem - in which no music seems to have penetrated his consciousness in any meaningful way since the jazz of the '50s, no theater since early Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and no movies since Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" in 1972.

More damaging to his work is his congealed worldview. Long ago Allen concluded the universe was godless, justiceless, and meaningless. The best we can do is eke out our hopeless lives with, as he titled one of his movies, whatever works. Here's what still works for Allen: Filmmaking. He continues to refine his technique. His movies are lighter, leaner, more fluid. "Blue Jasmine" is sour and derivative, but he sells it beautifully.

He does read newspapers, and in interviews expresses strong opinions about the unscrupulousness of Wall Street titans. In "Blue Jasmine," he makes his protagonist a kind of younger Ruth Madoff, wife of swindler Bernie, and sets her down in an updated "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Cate Blanchett plays Jasmine, once wealthy and ensconced in New York society, now broke and forced to travel to San Francisco and live with her working-class sister, Ginger, played by Sally Hawkins. They were adopted, and there's quite a gap in their styles.

When Jasmine isn't insulting Ginger's blue-collar boyfriend, played by Bobby Cannavale, she swallows tranquilizers and goes in and out of fugue states, babbling to anyone and no one while Allen whisks us back in time to life with her ex-husband, played by Alec Baldwin.

I don't think Allen identifies with Jasmine the way Tennessee Williams did with Blanche. He clearly hates her. She didn't know her husband was defrauding investors, but only because she didn't want to - not with shopping and Pilates and all those charity events. Calamity hasn't made her a better person. As she lies on a couch opposite her sister, she still can't face reality.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BLUE JASMINE")

SALLY HAWKINS: (as Ginger) Didn't I heard Eddie say he knows a dentist looking for help?

CATE BLANCHETT: (as Jasmine) Oh, forget it. Jesus, it's too menial. I'd go nuts. I want to go back to school. I want to get my degree and become, you know, something substantial. I can't just do some mindless job. Ugh. I was forced to take a job selling shoes on Madison Avenue. Oh, so humiliating. Friends I'd had at dinner parties in our apartment came in and I waited on them. I mean, do you have any idea what that's like?

HAWKINS: (as Ginger) No.

BLANCHETT: One minute you're hosting women and the next you're measuring their shoe size and fitting them. Erica Bishop came into the store. She saw me and was so embarrassed for me, she slipped out thinking I didn't see her. I saw you, Erica!

EDELSTEIN: That Blanchett played Blanche DuBois onstage is a mixed blessing. I found her too theatrical, too external: I wanted a grittier actress. But Blanchett does carry scenes that would trip up a less able performer, and she's a terrific physical comedian. In flashbacks, when Jasmine is living high, her posture - the uptilt of her head, the precision with which she holds her designer purse - is amusingly studied, as if she trained to be an Upper East Side trophy wife.

If you know Allen's work, or "A Streetcar Named Desire," you can predict almost every turn and twist of "Blue Jasmine." But Baldwin and Michael Stuhlbarg as a schnooky dentist and Andrew Dice Clay as Ginger's ex-husband, add deep and surprising shadings to their stereotypes. And you can never predict Sally Hawkins, best known as Poppy in Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky."

She's Blanchett's opposite - raw, goosey, spontaneous. Her best scenes are with a persistent suitor played by Louis C.K., a sensitive actor even with lines he didn't write. But I wish he'd re-written them: They end at the point where in his own TV show, "Louie," they'd mushroom into something more poetic and cringeworthy and revelatory.

In interviews, Louis has said he'd like to co-write a film with Allen, and I say go for it. I don't think Allen is too old to re-learn what in his best work he showed artists like Louis C.K.; that even ordinary people have the capacity to transcend their worst instincts and awful surroundings. And that you don't have to settle for whatever works.

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York magazine.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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