BLUE JASMINE---A Film Review

You have probably noticed that film reviewers who really really really WANT to like a movie (for whatever reason), will find something wonderful about it even if the movie itself is dreadful.  Often it is an acting performance.  "The Master" got raves everywhere solely on the basis that Philip Seymour Hoffman (God rest his soul), captured an unusual character in an astonishing way and made the film a masterpiece.  What the reviewers said about Hoffman may be true, but the movie itself closed instantly.  Nobody wanted to see the goddamn thing.  But oh, we were told, it's a tour de force!

All of which brings me to "Blue Jasmine," a monstrosity from Woody Allen.  This too was sold as a lifetime acting wonderfulness opportunity for Cate Blanchett, who has been nominated for the Best Actress award.  (And why didn't we realize before what a great actress she is?  What's wrong with us?  Do we all live in double-wides?)  It was also promoted as the great Woody Allen movie we've all been hoping Woody still was capable of making, and here it is!  At last!

In fairness, "Blue Jasmine" is not Cate Blanchett's fault.  She did her best.  But she was required to play a part written by a man who has been morally empty for twenty-five years, and now also hates women.  He didn't used to hate women.  He didn't hate women when he wrote "Annie Hall."  He didn't even hate women when he wrote "Manhattan" or "Hannah and her Sisters," (though one could make the case).  The tide turned somewhere around 1990, however, and now his misogyny has entered a darker, cartoonish phase.

The two main characters of "Blue Jasmine" are sisters.  No women like this have ever existed, and they never will.  These two literally have no interest in life other than finding a man to love and support them, both of them hate their own children, and neither the women nor anyone else in the movie ever suggests there is any possibility that their lives could be lived differently. The situation depicted in the movie is preposterous, and while there is nothing wrong or even unusual with a preposterous scenario in a movie, the reason it is preposterous is that Woody Allen wishes to present his own emptiness and nihilism as normal, as the best any of us can hope for.  He is wrong about this, of course.  None of us can deny that the human condition is fundamentally tragic, but that doesn't mean life is meaningless, or hopeless.  It is only Woody Allen's moral cowardice, his unwillingness to confront the difficult questions of existence, that leads him to make a movie as uniformly un-entertaining and full of despair as this one.  

From the opening frame, my spidey-sense began tingling immediately.  I don't know anything about film technology, but this movie looks different.  It is shot with an extremely high-definition camera and the result is an ultra-realistic, see-every-wrinkle-in-every-face film that strips the actors of all the glamour we have come to expect in a movie.  I mean, I know that the impossibly beautiful women we see on the screen are not as impossibly beautiful in "real life."  I know George Clooney might actually have a wart on his nose sometimes.  Fine.  I'm cool with artifice.  So it made me immediately suspicious when I saw Allen was determined to strip all that blurry, gauzy Hollywood glitz away and accentuate the ugly bits.  Why?  Does ugliness make art more "artistic?"  More meaningful?  More profound?  Or is that an aesthetic theory we generally outgrow by the age of fifteen?  

But that only pushed the needle on my pretentiousness meter up to 8.5.  It hit 11.0 (most pretentiousness meters go to 10.0, but I recently had mine recalibrated) when I realized there was not a single joke in the entire freaking movie!  Think about that.  First of all, it's a Woody Allen movie.  Remember him?  The guy who made "Bananas" and "Take the Money and Run?"  Just because of who he is, he could not have written this movie without throwing some jokes in it, accidentally, inadvertently.  That means he had to remove them; he had to edit out any hint of humor that might have somehow slipped in.  Then consider that three of the actors are Andrew Dice Clay, Louis C.K and Alec Baldwin---two stand-up comics and a great comedic actor.  It is unnatural, even perverted, that there would be no laughs whatsoever in this movie.

Copyright2014MichaelKubacki