Blue Jasmine (***1/2)

Another year, another Woody Allen film. Following 2012’s forgettable To Rome with Love, Allen has returned to America but found another new (for him) locale, San Francisco. Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), formerly Jeanette, formerly of Manhattan, formerly wed to a wealthy businessman (Alec Baldwin), has headed west to live with her very different sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins). When we first meet her, she’s bending the ear of her airplane seatmate in the baggage checkout area. She’s a narcissist who talks a lot, talks to herself when no one else is available, and presents numerous scenery-chewing opportunities for Blanchett, who’s in all but a few scenes. She’s often funny. Hawkins, whose breakthrough role in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky got her a well-deserved Oscar nomination, has the less showy (and slightly smaller) role, but is a worthy counterbalance/foil for Jasmine.

Ginger herself is a mostly happy-go-lucky despite having lost money, and perhaps her ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), in an investment scheme facilitated by Jasmine’s former husband, whose financial machinations are depicted in several flashbacks featuring Baldwin.

Woody Allen has made a lot of films about wealthy people, and a few about working class people, but the class themes in this movie, a source of some of both the comedy and the drama, are unusual for him. Issues of class, parental favoritism and sibling rivalry are mostly under the surface, but they, and Ginger/Hawkins, are what elevate Blue Jasmine above airier trifles like Midnight in Paris. Whether or not you root for the suddenly destitute Jasmine, whose husband left her with only the sense of her own superiority, to resurrect herself, you’ll empathize with Ginger.

The male characters —notably Clay as the ex and Bobby Carnavale as Ginger’s mechanic boyfriend — are both thinner (unidimensional) and broader (less subtle), but Carnavale  provokes a couple of the bigger laughs. Another unusual feature (for Allen) is that there are actually children in the film. These are also small roles, but the deadpan/bewildered looks of Ginger’s two preteen boys as Jasmine tries to explain the virtues of electroshock therapy and the importance of tipping well are nearly worth the price of admission.

This is more than the best film Andrew Dice Clay has ever appeared in; of Allen’s, it’s easily the best since Vicky Cristina Barcelona, five films ago, more substantial than Midnight in Paris while maintaining that film’s mainstream appeal. Maybe one day he will even discover the existence of music written after the 1930s.

IMDb link

viewed 8/6/13 7:30 pm [PFS screening]; posted 8/9/13

Arbitrage (***1/2)

Add Robert Miller to the pantheon of smug rich guys Richard Gere has long excelled at playing. There he is glibly explaining the financial crisis on a TV talk show, or having backseat meetings in limos, or doing a quick drop-in on his mistress’s gallery show, which he’s financed. But mostly he’s bobbing and weaving to complete the deal that will save him from the deal that even he who weathered the housing bubble could not resist, a no-risk proposition that went wrong anyway. Only selling the company can save him. None of this has much to do with arbitrage, which relates to exploiting short-term price differentials, but in this case the idea is to conjure an image of sophisticated financial chicanery.

This, the feature debut of Nicholas Jarecki, is an exploration of power and its limits in the guise of mainstream suspense at its best. One thing even the wealthy and powerful cannot avoid is the need for sleep, and it is this that causes the accident that threatens the deal, his family life, and his freedom.

IMDb link

viewed 9/27/12 7:00 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/27/12

The Queen of Versailles (***1/4)

Twenty-six thousand square feet. Enough room for a couple, eight kids, a nanny, and assorted staff. Enough room to host a reception for all 50 Miss America contestants. Could anyone want more? Apparently, David and Jackie Siegel could. When Lauren Greenfield began her documentary, David was the “time share” king who had recently opened his greatest project, a skyscraper in his adopted hometown of Las Vegas. He boasted of having personally gotten George W. Bush elected president. Jackie, his third wife, was an ex-beauty queen who had borne him a new family of seven young children, though a Filipino nanny did a lot of the less-fun stuff. (They had taken in another girl, Jackie’s niece.) And 26,000 feet was just not big enough.

The Seigels’ new place, nicknamed after the French palace, would become a boondoggle symbolic of the Great Recession, and David’s attempts to maintain his empire, and Jackie’s to reform lifestyle, would give Greenfield’s film an unexpected story arc. David Siegel has meanwhile sued Greenfield over her editing choices, which he argues exaggerate the financial troubles, but all things considered, they don’t come off too badly. At least, they seem more relatable, less hateable, than you would think if all you knew was the bare facts above. Jackie, who is the main character, may not be the world’s best mother—she freely confesses she wouldn’t have had so many kids if she needed to actually raise them herself—and she may be a bit childlike herself, but she’s no Leona Helmsley figure. That is, she’s pleasant to spend time with.

In the end, money, especially money one comes into suddenly, as by lottery or marriage, may not change a person so much as allow a person to indulge the personality one already had. That’s the sense I get here. It’s probably just as true of reality-show contestants, and that’s the vibe of this documentary.

IMDb link

viewed 8/22/12 7:20 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/13–9/15/12

The Company Men (***)

Wearing its earnestness on its sleeve, John Wells’s downsizing drama stars Ben Affleck as Bob, a suddenly laid-off sales manager for a large corporation based in Boston. Wells, a veteran TV writer/director (ER) splits his film between Bob and his former colleagues. These guys—and one can’t help but notice the dearth of women (or non-whites)—may have had more than most of the people who lost their jobs in the recent recession, but then, as research shows, losing what you have feels worse than not having had it in the first place. And so, cocky Bob, with a nice house, nice car, and a golf-club membership, has a lot to lose if the severance pay runs out. His nice wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) urges him to cut the expenses, but he doesn’t want to admit defeat.

Back at his old corporation, his older colleague (Chris Cooper) tries to hang on. His old boss (Tommy Lee Jones), head of the shipbuilding division, tries to convince the CEO (Craig T. Nelson) not to lay off even more workers, but is told, “We work for the shareholders now.” Later, Wells plunks Affleck and Jones down in an abandoned shipyard so Jones can trot out a hoary we-don’t-make-stuff-here-anymore speech. Wells has a habit of hammering home his anti-corporate message this way, including my point above about losing stuff. In the same shipyard scene, the older man laments that, having acquired so many things, men like him are “terrified of losing them.”

A documentary like Inside Job does a better job of critiquing recent corporate greed. The story of Bob and his family is the richer one here, including a subplot about the evolving relationship between Bob and his blue-collar brother-in-law (Kevin Costner), which might be a metaphor for Affleck’s career. The brother-in-law doesn’t much like Bob at first, but eventually Bob wins his respect. Similarly, with his directorial efforts (Gone Baby Gone and The Town) and roles like this, Affleck seems determined to win some respect of his own, as well as turn Boston into a film-making town.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/17/11