Woody's Sharply Rendered Update of "Streetcar" Anchored by Blanchett's Brilliant Blanche-Like Turn
If you want to see this year's master class in screen acting, you need to watch Cate Blanchett's mesmerizing performance as Jasmine French, a delusional Park Avenue socialite wife in Woody Allen's 46th directorial effort, a sly, bicoastal update of Tennessee Williams' classic A Streetcar Named Desire. As the film opens, her impeccably dressed character has hit rock bottom after her financial wizard of a husband is arrested and her assets are liquidated. In the throes of a nervous breakdown, she arrives in San Francisco and moves in with her kind-hearted sister Ginger who lives a modest, blue-collar life in a tiny apartment on the edge of the Mission - on South Van Ness near 14th Street to be exact - with her two hyperactive sons. You can tell Jasmine is not only out of her element but quite judgmental about how her sister's life has turned out. The irony of Jasmine's patronizing attitude is that she is a habitual...
Hilarious and heart-breaking!
Isn't that what we want from Woody? Yeah, it's his best work in some years. One of those films where he manages to withdraw his own personality to a distance, where there's no character obviously speaking the "Woody" part. That part's been done over the years with varying results by Kenneth Branagh, Will Ferrell, Larry David, and others. But when he vanishes all together, when there's just his characters, speaking in all their poignant screwed-up humanity, who needs the nebbish wise-cracking about how meaningless life is?
Some of the critics seem to see this movie as a scathing indictment of capitalism in general, Wall St in particular, an unbridgeable gap separating its tony, well-to-do characters and its scruffy middle class ones. What it actually is about is the perils of living a life based on pretense and deception, where the only ones who claim happiness in the end are those comfortable in their own skin, no matter how modest their means. Cate Blanchett is by...
One of Woody's best
I bought a ticket to this movie knowing absolutely nothing about it, and almost immediately as it began I knew I was watching a Woody Allen movie.
I cannot say exactly why this is so. Perhaps it was the richness of the character study, and the fact that Allen writes so excellently for female characters. In any event, Cate Blanchett's character, and her brilliant performance of this down on her luck former socialite married to a conman husband played by Alec Baldwin, may be the best female character performance you will see on a movie screen this year, and Blanchett's performance is probably the most Oscar worthy I have seen so far.
Set in San Francisco in the present day it unfolds the complex relationship of two sisters, one upper class but fallen on hard times, and her working class sister who makes working class choices. Because it unfolds in a non linear fashion it appears to dip randomly into different events over a period of about 15 years or so, and we...
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