descent into madness
by Douglas Messerli
Woody Allen (writer and director) Blue Jasmine / 2013
It seems fascinating to me that in a year in which I have focused on a frightening dichotomy of “murderers and angels,” veteran director Woody Allen has chosen to write a parallel version of Tennessee Williams’ great drama (my nomination for the best American play ever created) A Streetcar Named Desire, a work in which there are plenty of murderers but very few angels, unless one perceives Blanche DuBois’ loving sister, Stella, as an angel. In Woody Allen’s version, however, the clueless Ginger (Sally Hawkins) bears very little resemblance to the stage Stella—whom I have argued is the stabilizing “center” of Williams’ play (see My Year 2002)—and who, in Allen’s film version, lashes out against her sister just at the moment she is crying out in her deepest despair.
But neither Williams’ earth-bound Stanley nor the often hilarious
“space-cadet” Blanche can be described as angels, despite Blanche’s tendency to
float above reality. Both are instinctive killers even though they represent,
obviously, radical different viewpoints of reality. Blanche believes in
illusion, while Stanley is grounded in what is generally described as “the
real.” Most of us perceive that both of these viewpoints are slightly
delusional: “the real” which is not any more “real” than the illusions Blanche
projects upon the world. And both are rapacious destroyers of life, which,
fortunately, is neither “real” in the ordinary sense, nor a simple projection
of our imaginations.
As Stanley declares, as he is about to rape Blanche in Williams’ play—in
words to the effect—we had this “date” from the beginning, a clash by night
determined by their opposite ways of perceiving the world.
Allen’s Jasmine (Jeanette), not unlike Williams’ heroine, is already damaged goods before she arrives at the doorstep of her sister’s ramshackle apartment, despite her Louis Vuitton luggage and designer dresses, salvaged from the repossession of all of her previous loot. She has lost her “Belle Reve” not little by little through decades of ancestors selling it off, but through the sudden revelation of her husband’s, Hal’s (Alec Bladwin) utterly corrupt business dealings.
I’m not a big admirer of “flash-backs,” upon which this film depends to
clue us in to Jasmine’s glorious past, which is a bit like Gatsby’s grand
world, and like Gatsby’s world destined to the collapse upon the artifice upon
which it has been built. Yet Allen moves us astutely between past and present
to reveal the absolute implosions of his heroine’s life. Whereas Williams’
Blanche gradually fell into complete moral decay—ultimately even seducing one
of her schoolboys—Jasmine’s world was destroyed by her husband’s endless tissue
of lies, betraying not only every one of his investors (including Ginger and
her husband, who had won $200,000 in the lottery), but his wife through
numerous sexual relationships of which everyone but she was aware. Her sudden
fall from the grace of her posh Park Avenue rooms and Southampton beach house,
leaves what seems as a fragile woman talking to herself and imposing long
one-sided conversations upon perfect strangers.
Yet in these mad interludes, along with the insistent flash-backs, we
gradually begin to perceive that if her husband was a kind of Bernie Madoff,
she willingly played his perfect trophy of a wife, looking away from all of his
shady business dealings and sexual dalliances in order to maintain the glorious
life it afforded her, pretending to herself and others that she was truly a
moral being through her social involvement with various charities. One has to
almost applaud Allen for his deep satiric jab at the rich in this film, except
that as cynical as their world may be, so too is Allen’s own vision.
For unlike Blanche DuBois, the self-created Jasmine has few of the
former’s true psychological and emotional traumas. Despite the heroine’s
apparent fragility, she is, at heart, tough as nails, perfectly able to seduce
all the course men around her. Although Blanchett’s version of Blanche is,
before the movie has even begun, defeated, a destroyed woman, babbling in
“over-the-top” conversations, mostly to herself, but, at moments, even to her
sister’s wide-eyed children (who might almost be described, as in Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “no-neck
monsters”)—she is even described as having a nervous breakdown—Jasmine is a
seasoned predator, weaving her “gentleman caller,” the self-assured diplomat
Dwight (Peter Saarsgard) into her web of lies. Although Blanchett’s acting is
often quite brilliant in these scenes, she is often so close to the edge of
over-acting, switching accents and even acting modes so quickly that one hardly
knows whom she’s imagining who she might be. I still can’t determine what I
think of her performance. Let us just say it’s all a bit overwhelming, maybe
not as brilliant as it appears to some movie-goers who love see actors acting, but, at moments, she’s
wonderfully convincing.
Allen reveals that, despite Jasmine’s declared ignorance of the
completely empty world around her, she not only knew of her husband’s vast
deceit, but, when her husband threatens to leave her for another woman, uses,
in revenge, what she knows to have the FBI arrest him—all of which, obviously,
makes her a true collaborator in her husband’s crimes, and erases any possible
relationship with her now self-destructive son, whom she discovers is living
and working in Oakland.
The “Stanley” figure of Allen’s retelling of Williams’ tale, Chili
(Bobby Cannavale), does not “rape” this delusional woman—she has already
carried herself off from all human contact—but simply settles into Ginger’s
apartment, claiming his rightful territory. Allen’s poor once-rich Blanche,
takes her final hot bath and slips off into madness as a street person.
Although I have to praise Allen for comprehending some of the satiric
and comedic elements of Williams’ original masterpiece (even though so much of
his plot is ridiculously ensnared in what is an absurd, winking Woody Allen
conceit, about his heroine’s inability to comprehend how to take a computer
course in interior decoration, one has to wonder is there no one she might
encounter in that computer-rich city to show her how to get on line?), it is
hard to forgive the director for the chilling view with which he ends this
bleak work, where Jasmine is offered not even the kindness of strangers. There
is, at film’s end, accordingly, a kind of murderer in this work who willingly
kills off the woman who through her suffering, if nothing else, has become a
sort of fallen angel: the writer/director himself.
Los Angeles, August 18, 2013
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (November 2013).
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