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Alec Baldwin and Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen's 'Blue Jasmine.'
I always look forward to Woody Allen's annual movie if for no other reason than to hear his witty dialogue performed by whatever top-notch cast he has happened to assemble. Very few writers are able to capture the sound of true conversation as he does, and the performers in his films seem to rise to the occasion, thankful to have the opportunity to work with a script that's far better and more genuine than most that cross their path.
His latest, "Blue Jasmine," is not on par with some of his recent efforts ("Midnight in Paris," "Vicky Cristina Barcelona") but it's better than some of his subpar films such as "Whatever Works" and "To Rome with Love." Call it middle-of-the-road Woody, which is still better than most of the other tripe that clutters the multiplex. An update of "A Streetcar Named Desire," the movie is a character study of a woman who finds herself adrift in a world she doesn't understand and can no longer function in.
Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is a trophy wife who suddenly finds herself without a mantel to sit upon. Her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) has been arrested and jailed for pulling a Bernie Madoff-like scheme. Suddenly, Jasmine's days of shopping on Fifth Avenue, residing in her Park Avenue townhouse, vacationing in the Hamptons and having three-martini lunches with her vacuous socialite friends are a thing of the past. With no place to go, she's forced to move cross-country to San Francisco and move in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), an uneducated, blue-collar worker with a good heart and no class.
The tension between the two is immediate as Jasmine looks down on Ginger's way of life, her boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale) and her modest plans for the future. With no choice but to try and acclimate to this low-rent world, she takes a job as a receptionist in a dentist's office — which ends in disaster — and has the good fortune of crossing paths with a rich widower (Peter Sarsgaard) who may prove to be her salvation.
This is the rare Allen film that's uneven in tone and suffers from pacing problems. Told mostly in flashback — as if to mirror Jasmine's increasingly fractured mind — the movie struggles to achieve some sort of consistent pace. While there are some inherently funny situations, what with Jasmine shrinking in horror at the commonness that surrounds her, they're of the hit-and-miss variety and come off as a bit hollow in light of our heroine's plight. The choppy nature of the story and lack of narrative momentum prevent the film from being one of Allen's finer works.
However, it does contain some of the best performances seen in one of the director's works of late. Blanchett is dynamite in the title role, vulnerable, abhorrent, frightening, haughty and ultimately sympathetic. That we come to care for this damaged, clueless woman is a testament to the actress' ability to remind us of her vulnerability throughout.
Baldwin and Hawkins are fine as well, but the major surprise here comes from Andrew Dice Clay as Ginger's ex-husband who has lost his life savings in one of Hal's schemes. It's no surprise that the actor can fully inhabit this working-class Joe, but the pathos he brings to this man is a revelation and is a testament once more to Allen's unerring eye toward casting.
As I say, this won't rank with the director's best, but as a showcase of fine acting, there have been few films this year that can match the work of this fine ensemble.
'Blue Jasmine' (3 stars out of 4)
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, Andrew Dice Clay, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C.K., Peter Sarsgaard, Daniel Jenks and Max Rutherford.
Written and directed by Woody Allen; produced by Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum and Edward Walson.
A Sony Pictures Classic release. 98 minutes. Rated PG-13 (mature thematic material, language and sexual content) At the Art Theater.
Also new in theaters
'Paranoia' a thriller to sleep by. (1 star out of 4)
Entering its first weekend of wide release, Relativity Media's thriller "Paranoia" had received a 2 percent positive rating from the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes where positive and negative reviews from a wide variety of critics are averaged together to determine whether the consensus on a film is positive or negative. That percentage was calculated based on 1 positive review being submitted out of 45. The movie has seen an uptick in popularity, as it is now sitting at a robust 4 percent positive with two good reviews having now been filed against 55 bad ones. The film was screened late last week so that only a small number of critics would be able to see it in order to file their reviews before opening weekend, a strategy the studio hoped would help quell what they knew would be a tide of bad news.
With such negative buzz surrounding "Paranoia," I had to see for myself if it really is as bad as suggested, and I have to report that it is every bit as awful as I feared. This is a thriller that doesn't thrill, a film that moves at such a leisurely pace that if it were a car, icebergs would be breezing by it on the road. Directed with what was surely one eye on the camera and the other on the craft services table, this is a movie that could put an insomniac into a coma and might prove to be the Waterloo of its star, Liam Hemsworth.
The young hunk is Adam Cassidy, a working-class guy from the Bronx who wants to make it big in the business world. He's eager to climb the ladder at Wyatt Corp, a tech firm that prides itself in being ahead of the curve where releasing the latest electronic gizmos are concerned. Its head, Nicolas Wyatt (Gary Oldman), gets our hero in a compromising position and blackmails him into posing as a young employee at a rival firm, owned by Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford), so that he might steal the specs on their revolutionary new phone.
Director Robert Luketic, who has cut his teeth on comedies, both good ("Legally Blonde") and bad ("The Ugly Truth") in the past, has not the first idea of how to generate tension as the film's pace is too slow and tone tepid.
There's simply not a sense of urgency to this affair, and while Ford and Oldman do their level best to generate a spark here and there, they simply can't combat with the wet rag that is Hemsworth. Yeah, the kid's good-looking, but he has the charisma of a leaf of iceberg lettuce and the dramatic depth of a puddle. While it would be unfair to say he singlehandedly drags this film to the bottom, a more confident and assured leading man might have at least made it interesting. Hemsworth simply doesn't have that quality and in the future should be weary of being seen at a lumberyard — he could easily be mistaken for a 2-by-4.
'Jobs' explores the innovator's image but little of the man. (1-1/2 stars out of 4)
As a film biography, Joshua Michael Stern's "Jobs" is a Cliffs Notes version of an intriguing life as it runs afoul of many of the pitfalls inherent to this genre.
Ostensibly a highlight reel of its subject's life, the movie recreates key moments in the making of the Apple Inc. empire and polishes Jobs' image of being some sort of New Age guru who saw his inventions as a means for consumers to express and better themselves. In introducing the iPod to his employees who worship the ground he walks on, he describes the device as "A tool for the heart. Touch someone's heart and the possibilities are endless."
What a load of crap! The film is filled with far too many insincere, touchy-feely moments such as this and far too few scenes that delve into what truly motivated this genius.
Beginning with the 2001 introduction of the iPod and flashing back to 1976, just after Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) dropped out of college, the movie quickly dispatches the many key moments that have gone into the making of the Jobs legend — his struggles and triumphs at Atari, his starting up Apple Computers in his parents' garage with his friend Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad), the explosion of this company on the computer and media landscape along with the way he reinvented himself as the corporation found its own identity. Oh, and we see that he doesn't like to wear shoes.
The script by Matt Whiteley may have been more comprehensive in its original drafts, but here the story comes off as choppy and incomplete. While credit should be given to the writer and Stern for showing Jobs in a less-than-positive light at times (he had no problem cheating his friends out of money or taking credit for their work while he disowned his own daughter, whom the film suggests he never met) this makes the lack of in-depth analysis of the man all the more maddening.
Explanations or even conjecture as to why he treated people so shabbily or why he was so driven to succeed are never offered, and the film seems content with offering up these faults as simple quirks that should be excused because, after all, this guy invented the iPod. Really, how bad could he have been?
Really, the film was doomed from the start what with the casting of Kutcher in the title role. This young man is not an actor — he's a celebrity who happens to be very good-looking and very lucky. I don't know how many times I've seen him with a glint in his eye and a self-satisfied look on his face that seems to be saying, "I have no idea how I got here, but ain't it great?"
It happens again at the end of "Jobs" and only serves to prove once more that the universe is far from just and closer to crazy than sane minds care to admit.
For DVR alerts, film recommendations and movie news, follow Chuck Koplinski on Twitter at @ckoplinski and at his blog here[1] . He can be reached via email at chuckkoplinski@gmail.com.
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