All That Jas

All That Jas

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In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois is an alcoholic, a woman of privilege who’s fallen from grace and refuses to let go of her former lifestyle, who has to shift down a class and as a result has a nervous breakdown. She staves off the nervous breakdown for a spell by staying with her much-lower-down-on-the-economic-food-chain sister Stella, who is married to the thuggish, animalistic (but at least real, and at least in touch with who he is, and at least not pretending to be anything he’s not) Stanley Kowalski. Blanche and Stanley clash, as Stanley would like to continue hanging around in Stella’s house with his friends, and doesn’t want Blanche cramping the space. Blanche tries to solve this problem by latching on to whoever else she can (“I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” being perhaps the play’s most famous line, and a darkly ironic one, since none of the strangers are kind and of course Blanche really is only using it as an in for sex).

Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen’s new film, will feel familiar (at least plot-wise) to anyone who’s seen Streetcar. Jeanette (aka Jasmine, played by Cate Blanchett) is the disgraced trophy wife of Hal (Alec Baldwin), a hedge-fund manager who was arrested for fraud. After a nervous breakdown, having been found talking to herself on the street and given electro-shock therapy, she bunks up with her lower-class sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who throughout the film dates Augie, Chili, and Al, who are sort-of a three-way hybrid of Stanley, loserish thugs who can’t stand Jasmine’s fakery and who butt heads with her. But to say that Woody Allen has made a full-on remake of Streetcar is unfair, since a lot of the film is not only different from Williams’ play (none of the three guys tries to rape Jasmine, for instance, though her dentist-boss gets a little handsy), but it’s also vintage Woody. A “return to form,” the reviews keep saying, and that’s fair: Woody Allen hasn’t been this Woody Allen-y in about twenty-five years. Even his recent triumphs, like Midnight in Paris and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, were triumphs more because of the move away from familiar Allen tropes. It’s a tribute to his gift as a storylteller that our minds go not to Streetcar but to Crimes and Misdemeanors.

That’s for the most part a good thing, but it’s in a couple ways not, and let me get those out of the way so that I can properly praise the film, which is the second-best of the year. Allen’s always been praised as a writer (as well he should be; the screenplay is near-perfect), but as a director he’s never quite earned his stripes. And you sense, in the direction, something beneath the surface here, something kind of gnawing at the film or the audience or the characters or all three, an itch that can’t be scratched, because the screenplay is so air-tight and yet Allen makes what seem like freshman-in-film-school missteps like letting the otherwise-perfect opening scene go on for a beat too long (adding in the old woman remarking, “That woman wouldn’t stop babbling about her life,” when we just saw Jasmine being unable to stop babbling about her life), or else doing crude stuff like cutting to not one but three two-shots of Jasmine’s nephews as they listen to her uncensored tale of woe for a cheap laugh, when what we need in the scene is to watch Blanchett’s face as she tells us everything that happened to her.

The itch turns out to be Allen’s preoccupation with (or at least faith in the existence of) the Dangerous Hysterical Woman, a device he’s fallen back on in anything from Scarlett Johansen in Match Point to Jennifer Tilly in Bullets Over Broadway to Anjelica Huston in (yes) Crimes and Misdemeanors. This DHW is the heroine whose emotional instability, lack of reason, or just pure shrillness threatens to derail the otherwise-foolproof plan of the other characters. (Spoiler, skip to the next paragraph if you want to be surprised): It’s revealed eventually that Jasmine actually was to blame for the family’s downfall from wealth and privilege, and once you find that out, all the clunky shots from before make sense, because you realize that they’re not mistakes at all but actually Allen trying to evoke that sense of hysteria, that sense of everyone around Jasmine rolling their eyes at her or else looking at her like she’s nuts (which maybe she is, but it seems cruel to milk that for laughs)—which is why the final scene almost (but thankfully not quite) gets wrecked by a woman sitting juxtaposed to Jasmine on a bench, once again looking at her like she’s crazy and walking away from her.

However—again, this is the second best film of the year, and I only point out all this other stuff to accent how well everything else is done, to point out that none of this pretty problematic stuff ends up being a problem at all, because all the other elements keep it in check. Chief among those elements is Blanchett’s performance, which does not allow Jasmine to become unreasonable or unstable or shrill; it provides us an entry point into this character that miraculously helps us to understand the motivations for her actions. Her stoicism in the face of her sister’s tiny apartment, or her endless nonsequiturs as she goes from requesting her husband’s help with her sister to complaining about having missed Pilates (and yoga!), or the tiny smile of pride when she seems to be getting the hang of keeping dentist’s patients’ appointments—all of this lets you know she’s giving probably the most complex performance of the year.

And she’s not alone. The whole cast is great, with special mention going to Andrew Dice Clay of all people, who, like Stanley Kowalski before him, has to be an animal in every sense of the word: thuggish and brutish, but also unpretentious and completely and utterly himself, and when he runs into Blanchett and her new man on the street (by chance) toward the end, it’s the film’s most heart-wrenching moment.

And it’s the fact that they run into each other by chance that’s the film’s other really great achievement, and the thing the really does signal a return to form: Allen’s obsession with randomness, luck, and chance. Certainly he’s included that theme in a few recent films (mined almost to death in its hit-you-over-the-head execution in Match Point, or Sean Penn’s lamentations of being born the second and not first greatest guitar player in Sweet and Lowdown), but it hasn’t been done this subtly since (again) Crimes and Misdemeanors. Rather than throw it in our faces, the characters mention the idea of being victims of circumstance only in passing. Ginger blames the differences between the two sisters on their genes (is it nature, or nurture?), but they were also adopted, and there’s the further layer of chance that they could have been adopted to different parents entirely, or not adopted at all. “We ran into him by chance,” Peter Sarsgaard mutters under his breath about the run-in with Dice, and Allen allows the conversation to move on as soon as he mutters it. Even something as small as Jasmine’s name (“I fell in love with the name Jasmine,” Baldwin explains when he describes how they met) is a chance-y sort of thing, since her actual name isn’t Jasmine at all (it’s Jeanette), and had she not used it maybe they wouldn’t be together, and if they weren’t together then maybe this whole mess wouldn’t have happened. Which would, of course, be better for the characters, but would suck for us, because we wouldn’t have this truly awesome film to watch.

 

9/10

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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