Woody Allen’s ‘Blue Jasmine’ (3rd review)

In her BSR review of Blue Jasmine, Carol Rocamora describes Woody Allen’s latest film as “dispassionate, disturbing and downright baffling.” Carol wonders why Allen, at 77, seems so “unrelenting and forgiving” toward his protagonist, Jasmine French, whose emotional trajectory in this film runs from a nervous breakdown to a nervous breakdown.

“Has his worldview changed so late in the game?” Carol asks.

Not at all, I would argue. Woody Allen never had a worldview to begin with. He just wants to make movies, much the way a drone bee just wants to fertilize eggs. Woody Allen's films may be slightly more interesting than drone bees, but the bees work much harder to develop a fresh product.

Blue Jasmine— which purportedly portrays the tragic downfall of a fancy lady (Cate Blanchett) who loses everything when her investment scammer husband is exposed and jailed— is a film entirely consistent with most of Woody Allen's oeuvre since he stopped making comedies and tried to get serious. That would be 1975, when Love and Death, his parody of Tolstoy and Chekhov, was released.

Paris, London, whatever

Since then, virtually all Woody Allen films have shared certain common characteristics:

1) An astute grasp of literature, film and music, but no grasp of the real world. This is an introvert who draws his ideas from Tolstoy, Bergman and Tennessee Williams, not from interaction with people. Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011) demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the works of Hemingway and Fitzgerald but no sense that the authors' personas might have differed from their written words. Blue Jasmine deals with such subjects as high society, low society, high finance, adultery, crime, New York, San Francisco, politics, interior decorating and dentistry without providing a scintilla of insight into any of them.

Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, for example, have made marvelous fun of the modern medical office, where nervous patients spend hours waiting in the presence of officious receptionists who studiously avoid making eye contact with them. But in Blue Jasmine it's the receptionist (Blanchett) who is oppressed by unreasonable patients. When, you wonder, is the last time Woody Allen went to the doctor or dentist? Similarly...

2) No sense of the unique environments in which his films are set— at least not since Annie Hall (1977), which incisively captured the mindset gulf that separates New York from Los Angeles. Blue Jasmine takes place in San Francisco, where BSR’s Steve Cohen, after a recent visit, discovered a unique communal gestalt. (Click here.) But for all Woody Allen knows of San Francisco— not to mention his other recent film settings, like London, Paris, Rome and Barcelona— Blue Jasmine might as well be set in New York. He’s like a traveling rock star who takes his touring company from city to city without setting foot beyond the stage and his five-star hotel.

(Regardless of venue, Allen’s obligatory party scenes— the only places, Allen apparently thinks, where people meet each other— invariably present the same generic parties, full of generic happy guests performing generic dances to generic music, interchangeable from one Allen film to the next.)

Insipid dialogue

3) A preference for telling rather than showing, for talk rather than revelatory action. If Allen’s characters didn’t announce themselves as selfish or sensitive, you’d never know who was which. “You can tell a lot about people by looking in their mouth,” Jasmine’s dentist employer tells her, by way of demonstrating his awkwardness. “Life ain’t all work and no play, right?” says one of Jasmine’s sister's blue-collar buddies, by way of demonstrating his insensitivity. Which brings us to”¦

4) Insipid expository dialogue. Here's Jasmine boasting about her son: “Did I tell you Danny was first in his class at Harvard? He’s a math genius!” What do you suppose a Hollywood producer would tell you or me if we submitted such turgid prose?

When Jasmine’s rich husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), brings her to their dream house, she takes one look at the joint and exclaims, “This place is perfect— we hardly have to do a thing. You shouldn’t spoil me so!” Shouldn’t she at least make sure the toilets flush?

Allen also provides a glimpse of Hal cooking up deals for his big-time corporations: “Empire Solutions” and “Global Innovations” (I am not making these names up). “What if we transferred everything to the old corporation?” Hal asks his associates.

“We’d certainly get in trouble for that,” one partner sagely replies.

Time was when the young Woody Allen gleefully lampooned such drivel. Now he expects us to take it seriously.

Later, when Jasmine meets the presumed man of her dreams, this Mr. Right signals his sensitivity credentials by telling her, “I might just have an inflated ego, but I think I’d make a good Congressman.” This mid-level diplomat with political aspirations neglects to check out Jasmine’s background or family because, he tells her, “When something’s right, you know it immediately.”

Where, outside of Woody Allen’s hermetically sealed universe, do people talk or behave this way? And when was the last time you heard a memorable line in a Woody Allen film?

Sex in the rain

5) An almost total absence of characters who must struggle to make a living. Jasmine French says she’s struggling, but mostly she pops pills. Woody Allen doesn’t do struggle. (Mia Farrow as the jobless girl in The Purple Rose of Cairo is a rare exception.)

6) A dearth of subtlety and nuance. In Match Point (2005), Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers manifest their boundless passion by spontaneously fornicating in a wheatfield in the pouring rain. (Hey, it could have been worse— they could have done it in a cow pasture during a mudslide.) In Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett manifests her troubled state of mind by popping pills, swigging booze, accidentally scattering the contents of her purse on the sidewalk or angrily storming out of a moving car. “I can’t take this!” she shouts at another point. “For some reason, my Xanax isn’t kicking in!”

7) A preoccupation with the character portrayed by Allen’s real-life amour of the moment (Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow in the past) or, more recently, by the latest vicarious amour of his dreams (Scarlett Johansson, say, or Cate Blanchett). And conversely,

8) An almost total lack of interest in his minor characters— armies of Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns who exist solely to serve as cardboard sidekicks or sounding boards, like a nameless airplane seatmate or a similarly nameless lunch companion who asks Jasmine, “What’s the matter? Your mind’s a million miles away.”

The 1980 lampoon Airplane! did to such cliché scenarios what should be done to them: The bored airplane companion falls asleep and ultimately hangs herself rather than listen to the protagonist’s self-centered ramblings. But Allen, as I said, wants to be taken seriously.

By contrast, Mel Brooks

To be sure, every comic yearns to be taken seriously. Sir Arthur Sullivan longed to step up from light operettas to serious oratorios. Jerry Lewis recorded serious albums and made an unwatchable film about a clown in a concentration camp. Mel Brooks, best known for madcap comedies (The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein), also made serious films like The Elephant Man and 84 Charing Cross Road— but under a different corporate name, since he (unlike Woody Allen) knew that any film bearing the Mel Brooks name would create comedic expectations.

Here's the great irony about Woody Allen: This director who longs to be taken seriously refuses to take his own subjects, settings and characters seriously— by, say, trying to learn something about them, instead of simply conjuring them from his increasingly limited imagination.

It’s also true that Woody Allen isn’t the first director to see the world through movies. Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York was largely a vision of the 1940s based entirely on movies of the ’40s. Quentin Tarantino’s films, like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, refer entirely to movies as opposed to real life. But Scorsese and Tarantino had a point of view about the movie world in which they immersed themselves— which may explain why their films are so much edgier than Allen’s.

BuÓ±uel at 77

Nor is Allen’s advanced age a valid excuse for his lack of inspiration. Luis BuÓ±uel was 77 when he made the brilliantly inventive That Obscure Object of Desire in 1977. Kubrick and Truffaut created diverse masterpieces for decades because they were genuinely curious about the world.

Ingmar Bergman’s dark and suffocating view of marriage and the family, as expressed in films like Cries and Whispers and Scenes From a Marriage, struck me as ludicrously shortsighted— like taking the sun for granted because it shines only during the day— but at least it was a viewpoint honestly held. Woody Allen has no viewpoint. He wants to be Bergman or Truffaut or Tennessee Williams, but unlike them he has nothing to say.

The young Woody Allen craved our attention. The 77-year-old Woody Allen just wants to make movies— preferably with glamorous young actresses— if only to remind himself that he’s still alive. He gets away with these exercises in arrested adolescence because, after all, he’s Woody Allen.♦


To read another review by Carol Rocamora, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read a response by Carol Rocamora, click here.