Blue Jasmine

Depending on the Kindness (Enabling) of Strangers
or
Being Entitled to Your Opinion

Blue Moon/You saw me standing alone/
Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own/
Blue Moon/You know just what I was there for/
You heard me saying a prayer for/Someone I really could care for/
And then there suddenly appeared before me/
The only one my arms will hold/
I heard somebody whisper please adore me/
And when I looked to the Moon it turned to gold
Blue Moon/Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own



Woody Allen's 21st century version of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blue Jasmine, is a contemporary version of the play's tragedy in an unsympathetic post-Bernie Madoff/Wall Street Bail-Out world, turning it into a moralistic comedy.  It may seem a little misogynistic to be so mocking to someone as Williams' Blanche DuBois who has suffered a cataclysm, but when the someone is as cluelessly entitled and myopic as Allen's Jasmine (nee Jeanette) Francis (Cate Blanchett), there is a very real glee to see them get their, as the term is used in The Magnificent Ambersons, "comeuppance."

It's a brilliant conceit, combining Allen's love for classic literature and forms, tossing his own hang-dog spin onto it, while, for once, being refreshingly contemporary—something Allen hasn't really done of late, as he's had a depressive's obsession with the past for the past couple of decades (no matter how fresh the cast may be).

Allen starts his film (after the standard black background with white credits backed this time by '30's depression era rhythm and blues) with an (unusual for him) CGI shot of a jet approaching the camera, sailing by and moving away.  Jasmine Francis ("I fell in love with the 'Jasmine.' 'Jeanette' has no panache") is on that jet flying from New York to San Francisco to move in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins—her second film for Allen) for a fresh start after losing everything in her life.  They're both adopted and couldn't be more different (As Sally says "She got the good genes."); Jeanette is all high cheek-bones and au couture, while Sally is low class and all teeth, surrounded by Guido's and roughnecks. Jasmine has suffered a reversal of fortune as her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) has been caught wheeling and dealing in real estate schemes, ending up in prison, and committing suicide.  Her extended visit delays Ginger's boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale) moving in with her and her two kids by Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), he ex-husband.  There's a bit of a sandpaper quality to Ginger and Jasmine's relationship; when Ginger and Augie were married, they lost a lottery nest-egg investing in one of Hal's "get-rich-quick" investment schemes, something Jasmine forgets when she drama-queens over her own plight, and dismisses entirely when confronted with it.

Jasmine (Blanchett) and Ginger (Hawkins)

So it rankles when Jasmine pulls a Mrs. Madoff and claims victim-hood about the money she's lost. Jasmine has no plans, no prospects, and there are hints of a nervous breakdown after she was found wandering the streets talking to herself.  Now, she's popping Xanax with a vodka chaser and barely keeping ahead of anxiety attacks and comatose fugue states as she barrels through the lower echelons of San Francisco, trying to latch onto opportunities.

She decides to go back to school, learning computers so she can go "into" interior design, taking a job at a dentist's (Michael Stuhlbarg)—for which she is totally ill-suited (anything with the words "customer" and "service" in any combination would be)—to fund the courses.  In the meantime, from her lowly status, she lords it over the family and friends she finds beneath her.  That meaning everyone.

The flip-side to this is that people still find her attractive, as she puts up a great, if shallow, front, speaking of her glory days—which segue into flashbacks of her privileged happy life, only to find that once the flashback has ended, that she's still carrying on the conversation inside the flashback, and whoever she was talking through previously has left.*  It's a clever use of flashback as psychosis, a clever, nearly invisible off-shoot of the film-star (played by Jeff Daniels) stepping out of the film in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Where Allen has been living in the past the last few films, Jasmine is doing the same thing, to her detriment, as, whether in flashback or real life, it comes back to haunt her and take her away from the present and any future she might aspire to.

It's a return to near perfect form without the tricks and conceits that Allen used (during his "earlier, funny" films) and nicely merges the bi-polar extremes of comedy and tragedy that the more mature filmmaker in Allen has aspired to.  It also feels less fussy and musty than the after-taste some of the lesser Allen films have left of late.  After a lifetime of making good films, some classic and some merely pedantic, and eschewing his earlier stylistic tricks, one wonders if, at the age of 78, Allen's best films might still be ahead of him and that's an exciting prospect.


Blue Jasmine is a Full-Price Ticket.

Jasmine in her "fugue" state

* It's a bit like the Larry David monologues-to-the-camera in Whatever Works, only there's no child around to ask "Who's that man talking to, Mommy?"

Made in Dagenham

"Girls Behaving Badly (Acting Well)"
or
"That's How We've Always Done It"

Nigel Cole's Made in Dagenham tells the story behind the struggle to get the Equal Pay Act of 1970 passed—the one that finally guaranteed that in a Union job, a woman received equal pay to a man.

What's that, you say?  "We don't have that law in America?" 

Yes.  Precisely.

The action that led to that piece of...one hesitates to say "forward-thinking"...legislation was the 1968 Ford sewing machinist's strike in Essex, which resulted from the lady-sewers being down-graded to "unskilled worker" status and receiving a 15% reduction of their salaries.  Initially, the about-to-be-strikers merely wanted their status returned to normal, but finding reluctance on the part of the Union to support them, the entire group staged a walk-out, shutting down auto production for the entire plant.  It was only with the intervention of Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity Barbara Castle (played here by Miranda Richardson) that a compromise was reached, first bringing the women's salary to 92% of the men, upgrading it to 100% the following year, and, finally, the working out of the Equal Pay Act of 1970. 

The strike lasted all of three weeks.

But those three weeks shut down auto production at Ford's Essex plant, alienating the male Union workers and driving a wedge in Ford working households, splintering the machinist's Union (hypocritically balking at "all things being equal," comrade), and raising the ire of the Ford Motor Company, which sends an emmissary (played by Richard Schiff, and although shaved and looking different, he portrays the "dark side" of his "West Wing" character, Toby Ziegler). 

This all happened, but not in the way Made in Dagenham would have you believe.  The sewers left en masse, all 187 of them, but the film simplifies it to one woman who serves as the catalyst for the action.  There was no "Rita O'Grady" (Sally Hawkins), she's a construct by writer William Ivory to be a mouth-piece for all the issues in the film, the one everyone gravitates to when they have a point to make about the situation.*  She starts out being naive and not a "joiner," the better to have things explained for the audience, but she morphs into a Union firebrand who says all the right things at all the right times, while everybody else takes a back seat.  It simplifies things in the story process, sure, but if you're going to pay tribute to the efforts of a group, do you ignore them for the most part, in favor of fiction?  How's that paying tribute?  "Rita" is the one who impresses the Union rep Albert Passingham (Bob Hoskins) to join the negotiations.  She speaks up to the dragging Union bosses who don't see their demands as a "gain."  She's the one that Lisa Hopkins (Rosamund Pike), the upper-class, degreed wife of a Ford manager comes to when we need to be told the oppression of women extends beyond the factory...all roads lead to "Rita."  Like Cole's previous film Calendar Girls, there's a bit of patronization to the film, a sort of "aren't they cute, fighting for their rights and all (bless 'em)"

But, it's heart is in the right place.  At least.

Made in Dragenham is a Rental.

* Norma Rae was fictionalized, too, but at least there was a "Norma Rae," in the person of Crystal Lee Sutton.