Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. Image courtesy of Sony Picture Classics.
Woody Allen has, throughout his career, flirted with the philosophical question of when does homage cross over into outright plagiarism. I always felt that a film like Stardust Memories came down on the wrong side of that divide, ending up as more of a Fellini rip-off than a tribute. And 2013’s Blue Jasmine comes pretty close to that same line. Like a murder scene, it has the DNA of A Streetcar Named Desire all over it.
A neurotic, patrician woman (Cate Blanchett) who has fallen from grace indulges her delusions in order to sustain an internal vision of herself as a “substantial” person, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. She arrives at her sister’s rundown apartment in San Fransisco in a yellow cab instead of a streetcar, but that scene as well as pretty much every other one in the film is meant to evoke Elia Kazan.
Stanley Kowalski’s part is divided between Andrew Dice Clay (well-cast) and Bobby Cannavale (also well-cast) and neither of them ends up raping anybody, but other than that Blue Jasmine is mostly a dead ringer for the work of Thomas “Tennessee” Williams. The screenplay is modestly updated by the addition of a Bernie Madoff-style financial scheme as the plot device that precipitates our heroine’s mental decline, but the rest is pretty derivative.
It’s still a good film, as it’s built from good bones. Cate Blanchett is the movie’s focal point, rather than the Stanley Kowalski parts, and she gives a master class in acting. It’s a wonderful performance, and the film would be nothing if not for it. I love Streetcar mostly because of Marlon Brando’s animal magnetism and the feral energy he brought to that role. It’s always been much harder to drum up sympathy for Vivien Leigh in the film, and I guess that’s the point - she’s a neurotic mess, a compulsive liar and weak pathetic creature preyed on by the animals of this world.
Both characters - Jasmine and Blanche - bring their misfortunes on themselves, and both are meant to be deeply unlikable, but Blanchett takes it to another, more complex level with her acting. In Blue Jasmine, she walks a tight-rope between a callous air of blue blooded superiority, a twitching time bomb waiting to explode, and a walking tragedy mined for pathos. She is pathetic and tragic and sad and yet you do feel sympathy for her, despite her character being a truly awful person. That is a testament to great acting, even if it is occasionally a big overwrought.
You might argue this is not a Streetcar rip-off, but just Woody Allen playing with a particular kind of enduring archetype - the neurotic patrician leading lady battling her mental demons. That doesn’t really hold water because it’s a rather specific kind of archetype, and also because there are visual and thematic and character clues throughout the film that scream that, indeed, this is basically a remake in all but name with just enough alterations so that nobody will get sued. Nevertheless, it does distinguish itself by giving Blanche center stage and giving the character more depth and complexity, rather than just being a Stanley Kowalski howling in the night one-man show.
This movie is also noteworthy for an entirely different reason, nothing to do with its merits as a film. It is truly a little time capsule of Hollywood perverts who, in 2013, had no idea they were just waiting to be unmasked. It is tricky to watch or write about Woody Allen’s films now that it’s generally pretty widely accepted that he’s a sex criminal. Even if the DA doesn’t have enough to prosecute, the evidence is splashed in the trappings of his personal life and in his films. I mean, it’s not like he’s ever been subtle about it. Manhattan prominently features a story line involving a 42-year-old Allen dating a 17-year-old, something everyone just accepted as “art” back in 1979.
Even in this film, he inserts a scene where Michael Stuhlberg’s character tries to force himself on Jasmine. He just can’t help it. He’s got to put this stuff in his films, maybe to exorcise his own demons. I don’t know. Then, of course, the film is shot through with his trademark creepy fascination with dignified women brought low by mental breakdowns (see: Charlotte Rampling in Stardust Memories). This movie was released in 2013, when allegations of Woody Allen’s misconduct had not yet become the accepted narrative, so this film was just a little time bomb waiting to be retroactively interpreted as the perverted machinations of a sexual deviant.
But the real kicker, the thing that makes this movie a true Murderers Row of Hollywood sex perverts, is that Louis C.K. is in it too! Now, I was way out ahead of the curve on this Louis C.K. thing. When everybody was out there calling him a visionary genius, I was never drinking the Kool Aid. And then it turned out that the Masturbating Bear from Late Night with Conan was actually inspired by him, and the rest is history. So it’s just such an almost implausible irony that one of the most sexually depraved Hollywood icons, Woody Allen, directed this film and then cast another sex maniac, Louis C.K., in it and nobody had any idea way back when in 2013 that in just a few short years the veil would come off and they would be outed for the deviants that they are.
A truly fascinating film, this.
