Mixed Metaphors: BLONDE and DON'T WORRY DARLING

Marilyn Monroe has always been treated as, to borrow a phrase from Rodgers and Hammerstein, an empty page that men would like to write on. This is certainly the case with every public figure who passes from famous to iconic. But for Monroe, whose objectification has long obscured her individuality, it’s denied her participation in her performances. She’s too much the image: the legs, the cleavage, the billowing skirt, the tasteful nudes, the mole, and, yes, the blonde hair. Her genius as a performer, perpetually underrated by some critics and reclaimed by other (smarter) ones, was typified in films such as Some Like it Hot or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She’d somehow play both the oblivious sexual object and the shrewd self-presenter as she subverted sexist expectations of those attempting to define her. And yet when she’s trapped in the cultural memory we are so often left with the shallow glamor and the sordid details. From made-for-TV biopics (1980’s Marilyn: The Untold Story) and the occasional prestige big screen effort (2011’s deadly dull My Week with Marilyn), the beats of her life are somehow placed on a pedestal of reverence even as such slobbering lends easily to condescension and objectification. Even when she died, as Elton John would remind us, all the papers had to say was that she was found in the nude.

Now here’s Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, which, like Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, is interested in a mid-century icon as the icon, attempting to excavate in a freewheeling, loosely (or, in this case, tangentially) factual way, but feeling right about how they moved through the culture. But unlike Luhrhman’s glitzy, heartfelt montage, which has a palpable love for Presley every second, Dominik is largely skeptical of what Monroe did, and what was done to her. The movie has a blitz of montage and mix of style—varied colors and ratios and CG flights of fancy that trade off with a cold logic—that could only look slow and tame compared to Luhrmann (or Oliver Stone at his most manic), as it looks at Monroe from a cool remove. She’s Norma Jeane abused and exploited and rendered hollow by a culture that looks only at the surface, and a personality that grinds itself into traumatized dust. She’s played by Ana de Armas in a state of fret and worry, really only alive on screen or in bed. Her voice slippery and tremulous, pulsing with breath and anxiety, she fidgets and darts her eyes, looks up from underneath the makeup and hair done in a perfect simulacrum and steps into the spotlight, before retreating into the shadows again—or forced into yet another abusive situation. She’s beaten, raped, forced to have an abortion, run through a meat grinder of casting couches. All the time, she clings to the men in her life—a procession of famous men (Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio, Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, Caspar Phillipson as JFK) who think only they really get her. The her she sees on the big screen, the one we all love, she doesn’t recognize herself in there.

Dominik has previously done good work exploring American myth-making. His The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a great late Western, casting a critical eye on the consequences of living out a life of disreputable legend, and, in its brilliant final sequences, what happens to those left after that life has gone. Similarly, his Killing Them Softly takes traditional crime movie tropes and makes them into a grubby mirror of capitalist self-congratulation, a talky swirl of potent political cynicism. With Blonde, adapting a Joyce Carol Oates novel that has a passing resemblance to reality, his vision of Monroe is troubled by superficial confusion. It’s interested in surfacing the real ugliness of parts of her life, and eliding any pleasure or control she may have had. Typical of the film’s interest in her work is a scene set in a theater playing the last scene of Some Like it Hot—with its hilarious final line chirped out with perfect timing by Joe E. Brown and wide-eyed reaction from Jack Lemmon. Dominik doesn’t let us hear any laughter from the crowd. Instead there’s eerie silence followed by sped-up footage of rapid-fire applause. Blonde creates a vision of Monroe’s stardom as nothing but product, served up to the masses in a va-va-voom wolf-whistle package. Watch the cross-cutting of the woman getting a—ahem—hand from a fella in a theater while the roaring waterfalls of the trailer for her film Niagara gush forth on the screen.

You can’t say the movie’s not boldly trying out its ideas. It’s lousy with thin Freudian analysis—the words “mother” and “daddy” are murmured here more often than in a Tennessee Williams play. Her mom (Julianne Nicholson) is cranked up near Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest levels (though “Get! In! The! Bath!” is no “No! Wire! Hangers!”), and pop is a black and white glamor shot that haunts her. (Echoes of familial tension are doubled by a CG fetus slowly twirling in amniotic fantasia.) It's perhaps perversely resistant to entertainment or nostalgia, dripping as it is with classic movie clips digitally altered to place new people in old shots, and copious period detail. Here Hollywood is shown as a suffocating spectacle that wraps Norma up in increasingly tight framing and sun-dappled faux-grain that cinches in just as her stardom expands. Her chaotic upbringing and tumultuous affairs are also grim—she never enjoys sex, and even the men who worship her body fall flat when getting access to it. JFK lounges with disinterest on the phone while she leans over his lap; more baroque configurations of bodies earlier in the film are blurred and bleakly mechanical; powerful men invade her and use her and think nothing of her. Here’s a stark movie that revels in its misery, and avoids all hero worship and vicarious success of the True Hollywood Story. Instead, it’s a burning Babylon of a city, with wildfires, broken women, and madmen whose suits buy them respect they don’t deserve. It’s a young woman with a tear running down her cheek. But Blonde isn’t interested in anything more that gorgeous misery. It just hurts. In doing so, the movie does the exact same thing it laments—turning her pain into its own narrative from which to profit. That leaves, no matter its intriguing qualities, its ambitions beyond its reach.

But at least it has reach, which is more than one can say for Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling. It, too, wants to interrogate the prison of pining for mid-century femininity. Too bad it’s just a slice of Swiss—thin, cheesy, full of holes. This misfire wants to be a mysterious mind-bender of a picture in which an idealized 50’s suburban community is slowly revealed to be Up To No Good. (Gee, where have were heard that before?) Because it’s 2022, that means it starts like a bad episode of The Twilight Zone and ends like a typical episode of Black Mirror. Florence Pugh stars as a seemingly happy housewife who cooks and cleans and shops and takes ballet lessons and hangs with the other neighborhood women. It’s a company town where the men drive off to the plant and are in constant admiration of their boss (Chris Pine). Pugh starts to suspect something’s up with the men’s double-talk and the other weird sub-WandaVision breaks with reality revealing that everything’s pretty empty in this existence. She’s literally trapped behind glass walls or cracking open empty eggs. Get it? But the free-floating symbolism never adds up and a potentially interesting stew of topical and philosophical ideas get buried in the movie’s long, slow trudge—flat declarations, muddled revelations, confused supporting characterizations, perplexingly fuzzy world-building.

The irritating lack of specifics here—everything’s burnished and polished and vacant—make the eventual revelations feel all the more inadequate. It’s the kind of dull thriller that one thinks back through with full knowledge of the twists and finds it even more lacking. If that’s what’s going on, then it makes even less sense, one thinks. You could probably talk for hours with your friends about every nagging loose end of confused sub-twist, but, gosh, how boring would that be? The movie does have Pugh giving it her all, even with as inconsistent a scene partner as Harry Styles as her husband who loves getting down to business on her, and also endlessly twirling on stage for his buddies. And Pine is perfectly sinister as her foil, a masculinist phony clearly cultivating a cult of personality—he’s like a few prominent poisonous alt-right faux-intellectual men you might think of. But the movie clicks into its most interesting ideas right as it all falls apart, and makes such a hash of its conclusion that one feels all the more intently the waste of time it took to get there. Sure, kids these days might not’ve seen—and here’s a warning that if you’ve seen the following you’ll start to glean this one’s twists—The Stepford Wives or The Truman Show or Pleasantville or The Village. (They should, though!) Even they might smell this one’s meager second-hand nature.

Small Wonder: ANT-MAN

The lightest and slightest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ant-Man steps away from the main Avengers for a pleasant diversion introducing a new superhero. It does so without the belabored setup, grindingly monotonous effects, and constipated cross-pollinated plotting that encumbers so many of its kind. Instead, it gives most of its runtime over to a simple, straightforward plot, embracing goofy comic book technologies and funny supporting performances. Turns out locating the inherent silliness in this material is exactly the right approach, even if it gets tangled up from time to time in its larger expanded franchise and caught flat footed with the creeping sameness in the flavorless look infecting all of these MCU projects. Still, for a big budget summer spectacle, this one passes by surprisingly quickly and does its best to avoid lumbering.

Perhaps Marvel has realized their best films in the franchise steer towards the casual and comedic. That’s why the best parts of the Thors, Iron Mans, and Captain Americas (not to mention Guardians of the Galaxy, which has yet to be Avengersed) take themselves lightly, with quipping banter and nice sight gags, and the worst parts are the endless bland action and portent. Ant-Man, directed by Peyton Reed (of Bring it On) and written by Edgar Wright (The World’s End), Joe Cornish (Attack the Block), Adam McKay (Anchorman) and star Paul Rudd, maintains its sunny tone and brisk high spirits, never giving itself over to thundering exhaustion. Rudd, one of the most charming actors working today, centers the movie on a tone of easy-going amusement, even when confronted with peril. It’s a nice change of pace.

Rudd plays a burglar whose attempts at going straight are halted when a wealthy retired tech genius (Michael Douglas) persuades him to help steal his shrinking technology from a cold capitalist (Corey Stoll). To do so, the inventor will let his new thief friend borrow his old top-secret superhero suit, a portable shrinking device that’ll turn its wearer into Ant-Man. The following is a loping heist picture as the two men look over blueprints, and engage in brisk training montages. But what good is it to be so small? Well, it gives Ant-Man super-strength, plus the ability to slip into a maximum-security research facility undetected. Rudd casts an amused skeptical gaze on the proceedings, quick with a fumbling everyman charisma. He interacts with Douglas’s stern mentor, as well as Evangeline Lilly as the old man’s no-nonsense daughter, by pinging off their seriousness with an irreverence obviously masking bewilderment.

By playing up the strangeness of being thrown into these circumstances, the movie finds an appealing groove. After all, it’s not every day you see the world from a bug’s-eye view. Reed has good fun conjuring the look of the everyday world towering over the miniaturized Ant-Man. It’s a likable callback to The Incredible Shrinking Man or Fantastic Voyage or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. There are immense blades of grass, cavernous vents, vast puddles, and, of course, large, lovable, trainable herds of ants. It has a chintzy matinee spectacle appeal togged up with digital gloss. Plus, it’s funny to see big, booming adventure intercut with humdrum still life. When Rudd first tries on the suit, he ends up hanging onto a groove in a record as it spins on a turntable. In sweaty close-up he grasps and gasps. Cut to a wide shot as the needle skips. There’s some wit to the staging, and it only escalates as the danger grows.

Even more so than in the similarly mildly flippant Guardians, Ant-Man’s comedic tone is maintained throughout. It’s stuck in rigorous franchise making, with the worst scene a shoehorned cameo from an Avenger. But it’s still just loose enough to accommodate the pleasures of letting the cast’s chemistry simmer. It helps that supporting roles are filled by the likes of Michael Peña (a delight), T.I., Bobby Cannavale, and (an underutilized) Judy Greer. Reed keeps the plot – a limber heist laced with family issues – hopping along, trusting this ace cast to maintain high levels of appealing personality. By the time we arrive at the inevitable climactic battle, it’s tweaked with real levity – actual funny throwaway lines and teasing use of effects – and allowed to end before overstaying its welcome. Sparingly and creatively deploying the unusual superpowers in clever ways for fast, lean setpieces, its motions don’t grow tiresome. There’s simplicity to this movie that allows it to remain light on its feet. Sometimes thinking small pays off.

Live and Let SPY

A big, broad action comedy, Spy works by using evergreen genre elements – in this case, secret agent thriller tropes – and taking them seriously. There’s a missing nuke floating around the black market and the CIA wants to stop its sale. The process involves evil arms dealers, slimy smugglers, fancy women, and clever gadgets. At every turn we find bruising hand-to-hand combat, bloody shootouts, and fast chases involving several modes of transportation. There are surprise reversals, unexpected reveals, and double, triple, quadruple crosses from agents in too deep. It plays like a rip-roaring globetrotting adventure. That it just so happens to be hilarious is even better. It’s the rare action comedy that holds up both ends of its bargain.

By treating genre elements so plainly – squint a little and it looks like a Bond movie – writer-director Paul Feig gets comedy out of writing scenes slightly askew from the norm. This isn’t a spoof or parody of the spy picture. No Austin Powers here. This is a full-on embrace of the spy picture. Its title sure isn’t lying to you. Spy is what it is, simply and funnily. In the center is Melissa McCarthy, working with Feig for the third time after Bridesmaids and The Heat. They’re having a productive collaboration turning the expected beats of a chosen comic subgenre slightly on its head through force of offbeat screen presences and his ability to get not just laughs, but genuine, affecting performances. Here Feig writes her a starring role in a take on an oft sexist genre and uses it to refute sexist assumptions. In scene after scene, a woman male colleagues dismiss gets the job done. Anything a Bond can do, she can do.

McCarthy plays a mild-mannered desk-bound agency employee, used to compiling dossiers and feeding field agents recon through their earpieces. Over the course of the movie, she’s forced into the field and there, after initial fish-out-of-water floundering, her talents bloom. Putting her in the place of the usual strong silent spy, dry quips become filthy barrages of exasperation and determination. She, an unassuming, underestimated agent, is called into an undercover mission because a baddie (Rose Byrne) is in possession of a list identifying all known agents. An unknown is needed to track Byrne down and take her out, especially since she’s also the one selling the loose nuke and has already removed one suave agent (Jude Law) from the equation. Scenes of espionage take on fresh interest as McCarthy gets an opportunity to be every persona in her range. She’s playing a sweet professional who’s out to prove her doubters wrong, slipping effortlessly into disguises: sad cat ladies, confident whirlwinds of profanity, and glamorous international women of mystery.

Between exposition, one-liners, and dirty insults, Spy is a rush of physical comedy and exciting action. Feig finds a balance between slapstick and violence, moving from tense to jokey, exciting to funny, gory to gross-out gags. It’s a tricky dance of tone pulled off with aplomb. The characters are appealing, the plotting is crisp and clear, and the stakes are silly and high. It’s the breeziest spy picture in ages, delighting in how light it is. It works because the writing is consistently clever, the performances are terrifically calibrated to straddle the demands of serious thriller mechanics and goofy comedy while still feeling consistent in character. The entire ensemble has great fun tweaking their images, playing familiar parts in eccentric directions.

Byrne is a delightful icy villain, while Law has a good time taking the suave superspy to a goofy place of dangerous unflappability. There’s a goofy assistant back at the base (Miranda Hart, in a role calling on eager happiness incongruous to the dire stakes), a no-nonsense superior (Allison Janney), and a greasy Big Bad (Bobby Cannavale, pickling his charm). Best is dependable man-of-action Jason Statham as a macho master spy frustrated after being sidelined by McCarthy. He blusters about her inadequacies while bumbling his way through the story, making things worse for everyone. Showcasing a welcome sense of humor, he pokes fun at his usual roles. At one point he rattles off a list of exaggerated near-death experiences from prior missions – “I once drove a car off a freeway on top of a train while I was on fire” – that’s both amusingly hyperbolic and could easily be actual scenes from his filmography.

And yet McCarthy’s the clear star here. Her arc is treated respectfully without losing sight of her comic gifts. Even when she tumbles out of a scooter or vomits over a corpse, the joke's with her, not at her expense. She's in command of every scene. It’s one of her finest, funniest performances, terrific sight gags and muttered asides keeping the laughs flowing while building up real affection and sympathy for her character. She moves between slippery false identities, slowly increasing a core of self-esteem while becoming a very good spy. She shows her character’s progression filtering through layers of disguises in action. It helps that Feig is a more confident visual stylist with each film he makes. Spy looks, sounds, and moves not like a comedy, but like any big studio thriller, glossy and expensive. The surface sheen makes it all the funnier as it moves so fleetly through its exciting silliness. I was more thrilled and amused by McCarthy's espionage than many non-comic movie spies'.

Pick Up Your Chin and Grin: ANNIE

If there has to be a new Annie, this is the way to do it. Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin, and Thomas Meehan’s familiar musical about a little red-haired orphan girl in Depression-era New York has been cleverly modernized, made cheerily diverse and relentlessly upbeat. It rescues her from the cornball dustbins of community theater and John Huston’s lumbering, intermittently charming, 1982 adaptation, making her relevant and fresh. It opens in a schoolroom with a close-up of a red-haired moppet giving a report in front of the class. She eagerly takes her seat as the teacher says, “Thanks, Annie. Now, Annie B? It’s your turn.” Up pops Quvenzhané Wallis, the captivating child actor Oscar-nominated for Beasts of the Southern Wild a couple years ago. She’s beaming, ready to take the center of attention. It’s a new Annie for a new Annie, a welcome sight to start the remake.

This Annie’s an optimistic foster kid living with a group of girls with their foster mother Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz). The woman’s a bitter drunk, collecting foster parent money to help her pay the bills. The kids are miserable but upbeat, singing, cleaning, and dreaming of adoption. Annie doesn't want to be adopted. She wants to find her parents. One day she lucks – well, literally bumps – into the good graces of Will Stacks, an antisocial billionaire cell phone mogul (Jamie Foxx). He’s running a floundering mayoral race, and his team (a fussy Rose Byrne and slimy Bobby Cannavale) thinks good deeds will help raise his poll numbers. He was caught saving this poor girl from an oncoming vehicle, and the public loved it. The video went viral. So he decides to take in Annie for a while, without realizing that such a bright light is bound to melt a grump’s heart.

That’s more or less Annie like you know it, but writer-director Will Gluck, with co-writer Aline Brosh McKenna, streamlines the plot, letting the precocious long-winded period piece of yore lose some stuffiness by trimming most of the bloat. Gluck keeps the core of sentimentality, but puts a contemporary gloss on top. Now the plot is fast-paced good-natured comedy and uplift, slickness and auto-tuned cheer, trading a mansion for a luxury penthouse apartment, and updated with tweets, cell towers, and selfies. That sounds like it should be only craven and commercial, but it’s wrapped up in the sweetness inherent in the source material. It works as a brightly lit fantasy New York City for a girl’s dreams to come true just because she’s nice, smart, and deserves it. It’s all high-energy good-spirited smiles and songs. And when I think of the girls around the world who will look at this Annie and see themselves, it makes me pick up my chin and grin.

It helps that Wallis is the most adorable and sympathetic Annie I’ve ever seen. This Annie sings well, has a great smile, and has greater agency over her own narrative. She’s not just hoping. She’s taking action. She sees the angles that get her into a rich situation, and in the climax engineers her own rescue with savvy exploitation of social media. You want her to do well, and the soft edges kept on the plot’s hard edges of abandonment, plus the cultural memory of the play’s songbook, have you knowing she will be okay. It’s bright, light, cheerful, and sweet, determined to see every character redeemed if possible, even when Hannigan gets up to her scheming ways. The movie cares about its characters, and reluctantly doles out a few comeuppances in the end on its way to a happy production number finale.

Gluck, who, if you recall, included a terrific musical number for Emma Stone in his should-be-a-cult-classic teen comedy Easy A, shows a knack for feather-light family-friendly musical filmmaking. He keeps the proceedings bouncy and pleasant. Not all the comedy works – too many pop culture references and clumsy innuendos – but he has a sparkling fizz to the artificial sugar of it all. The game cast – Bryne and Foxx are especially likable, Cannavale’s Broadway-big, and Diaz tries hard – helps keep the good feelings flowing. It looks like they've having fun together. When it comes to the musical numbers, Gluck cuts around imprecise framing in rhythmic editing that matches the mood, skipping around the sequences in the usual modern style that gives off the impression of dancing instead of letting us take in the choreography. But the performers’ spirited charm sells the genial toe-tapping effort.

This remake retains the best of the original’s songs – “Maybe,” “Hard Knock Life,” “Easy Street,” and of course “Tomorrow” – spruces up a few dustier ones – “I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here” gets a new beat, “Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” gets a new style – drops some of the duller numbers and adds a few dull new ones. But it also gives Annie a new yearning number, “Opportunity,” she sings at a fundraiser she attends with her new temporary foster dad. Here she gives thanks for her bit of luck and promises to make the most of it. It reaffirms this new Annie’s focus on the girl herself, letting her do more than wait optimistically for another day. She’s smart and motivated enough to make the best of her luck to create her own tomorrow. She knows the world can be a mean place, that help doesn't always come to those in her situation, but chooses to face the day with a smile anyway. This movie, all heart, sugar, and uncomplicatedly slick music, has brought new life and new faces to an old-fashioned story, and can bring a smile if you let it.

Good Eats: CHEF

Chef follows a man who once cooked for the love of it, but who, in his comfortable position as the head chef at a decent middlebrow restaurant, finds his passion dimmed by churning out the same old menu night after night. After a high-profile explosion of frustration that ends in him losing his job, he decides to strike out on his own and along the way rediscovers the passion that made him a chef in the first place. It’s tempting to read the movie as a metaphor for its own making. Writer, director, and star Jon Favreau got his start with relatively small productions (Swingers, Made) before getting bigger and bigger budgets (Elf, Zathura, Iron Man), eventually arriving at Cowboys & Aliens, a movie so blandly wedded to the worst storytelling impulses of modern Hollywood that I’ve already forgotten it ever existed. Now he turns up with the small, amiable Chef that says he would rather make something small and likable all on his own, instead of something big and predictable for someone else.

Both he and his character want to take their art wherever the muse leads them and have an audience show up to try the results because they trust the impulse behind it. Some scorn is reserved for customers who just want comfort food that provides what the consumer already expects. (What this metaphor says about someone like me who really likes his Iron Man 2, a movie he’s expressed disappointment with, is probably better left unexplored.) In any case, Chef follows a comfortable path as Favreau’s Chef Casper gets his professional groove back, reconciles with his ex-wife (Sofía Vegara), spends more time with his 10-year-old son (EmJay Anthony), and figures out what he really wants to be cooking.

It is not exactly a scrappy indie, but it’s probably as close to it as a baggy, pleasant, modestly budgeted production filled with recognizable actors can be. It’s the same kind of comfort food cinema Favreau has always been making, but the perspective is smaller and the heart more recognizably bleeding out on its sleeve. It is a shallow movie, and a long and shaggy one at that, but it has surface pleasures that keep it light, loose, and agreeable. Kramer Morgenthau’s bright cinematography finds the sun always shining. The montages of food prep look delicious. The non-stop brassy Cuban and New Orleans-influenced soundtrack is always rocking toe-tapping tunes. The film takes pleasure in its tasty dishes and booming music, and in the easy rapport amongst its characters.

As Chef Casper tries to figure out how to continue his career and find fulfillment in different aspects of his life, the movie ambles along, moving from a work/life balance comedy into a road movie in its second half. Along the way, we meet an ensemble cast of thin characters filled out by familiar faces. Dustin Hoffman plays his ex-boss. John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, and Scarlett Johansson worked with him at the restaurant. Oliver Platt plays a famous food critic whose negative review is the inciting incident that gets the Chef fired. (More on that later.) Amy Sedaris has a funny scene as a determined publicist and Robert Downey, Jr. turns up in a very small role as an eccentric businessman who wants someone to take a busted old food truck off his hands. None of these characters are particularly well developed, but the performers are enjoyable presences, able to step into the film and be entertaining for a moment or two without pulling focus from the ensemble as a whole.

It’s too fuzzy and insubstantial to be called a character study, but it at least has a sense of self-awareness. That can all too easily slip away from a writer-director-producer-star driven production. Chef looks upon the creative personality of Chef Casper with an understanding that his ego, pride, passion, and self-doubt combine to create the drive that leads him to success and are the same traits that lead to his blow-up, then feed his drive to reinvent himself. A lazier movie would take the critic character and make him only a snarky villain, but it’s refreshing to see that he’s presented as a man doing his job just as much as the chef is. And when his bad review upsets the chef so much that he throws a fit in the middle of dinner service that ends with him storming out jobless, it’s because the writing picked at preexisting insecurities. The chef knows he could do better. Getting called out on it frustrates him, but that frustration quickly becomes determination.

The movie is confidently pleasant, cooking up an agreeable couple hours of entertainment. It’s no great thing, but it’s enjoyable. Its heart is in the right place, made with as much love as the tasty-looking sandwiches featured prominently in the movie’s final stretch. I bet theaters showing Chef would do well if they added them to the concession stand menu.

Woman Past the Verge of Nervous Breakdown: BLUE JASMINE

As painful and precise a character study as Woody Allen has ever made, Blue Jasmine is built around an incredible performance by Cate Blanchett. She plays Jasmine, a New York City socialite whose banker husband’s financial malfeasance resulted in a rare prison sentence for him. The legal proceedings wiped out their collective wealth and now she’s stuck living with her working class sister (Sally Hawkins) in a tiny apartment in San Francisco. Allen deftly cuts between flashbacks that swim with ostentatious wealth – palatial vacation homes, richly decorated ballrooms, apartments with wide spaces filled with elegant bric-a-brac – and her daily struggle to survive post-scandal. We hear that some time before the film’s present day she was found alone in the street babbling to herself. Coming out of a flashback, the camera sometimes finds her in the corner of the frame, muttering and mumbling about the events we’ve just seen. As the film slowly fills in the full picture of the downfall of her riches and her husband, it’s clear that this damaged woman so tenuously restarting her life is a woman well past the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’s deep in the midst of it, with only fleeting slivers of hope of making it to the other side.

What we have here is a duet between a master filmmaker and a virtuoso performer. Blanchett is remarkably fragile, broken in deeply neurotic ways that run well past the typical Allen type. Here she’s a woman in the middle of a self-deception. Although she’s broke, has barely a cent to her name, she’s stuck in a wealthy state of mind that keeps her realities from sneaking into her consciousness too deeply. Her husband (Alec Baldwin) was a man who kept her in the dark about his business practices, but she was complicit in that lack of information. She enjoyed the rewards too much. In a potent metaphor for recent economic turmoil, he’s caught in the wrongdoings while she’s the one left to scramble with nothing, not even able to fully process what she’s lost. (Of course, that the legal system actually punished this bad banker is a cinematic fantasy.) In one of the opening scenes, she’s complaining to her sister about the conditions of the first class flight that took her to San Francisco. “I thought you said you were broke,” her sister says. “I am!” Jasmine howls, not seeing the contradictions that sit so plainly on the surface of her narrative.

Allen sees them, though, and the film is unsparing as it watches Jasmine struggle. It’s a film that’s scathing and sympathetic, a contradiction that’s reconciled by the push and pull of the film’s elegantly composed, beautifully filmic cinemascope cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe and the raw emotion storming under and cracking through Jasmine’s barely composed exterior. The film is so cleanly cut, crisply crosscut between past and present. It’s gorgeously blocked, stretching across the frame with care. It’s sharply drawn, surrounding the simple story of a woman trying to find some way to put her life back together with a vividly sketched ensemble of strivers that counterbalance the emptiness of her aspirations and vacuousness of the lifestyle she lost.

Her sister’s surrounded by romantic entanglements old and new, an ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), a current boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale), and a maybe-new boyfriend (Louis C.K.). They’re all working class guys who draw the scorn of Jasmine. Their personalities clang against the personalities of the wealthy guys she had grown used to. “You settle for the men you think you deserve,” she snaps to her sister. She, on the other hand, sets her sights on a guy (Peter Sarsgaard) who has eyes on climbing a ladder of social influence. Of course she can’t tell him who she really is. Is it better to be honest with a problematic guy you get to know, or dishonest with a guy who remains unproblematic the less you care to know and care to let him know? The answer seems clear.

But Jasmine could care less if she’s doing the right thing, so long as she thinks she is. She has a need to be correct at all times, or at least a need to be seen as correct. She views every slight, no matter how minor, as a personal affront. Any potential career starter she views as beneath her. She wants the results only and wants them now. Told she has to get a job, she sniffs that the only options for a middle-aged college dropout are “menial.” But she doesn’t see herself and her reality in the terms she entertains just long enough to dismiss. She’s an all-American temporarily disadvantaged millionaire waiting for her ship of money to come in. She simply doesn’t know what to do with herself until then. The film doesn’t know what to do with her either, content to show her to us without much else to balance out the cruelty and emotional damage (to herself and others) following her wherever she goes. Allen is content to serve up this character portrait, vivid and wounded, and leave it at that. It’s as invigorating as it is frustrating, a pained fascination with an uncomfortably complicated character worth turning over in one’s mind long after she’s off the screen and the credits have rolled.

Point Blank Payback: PARKER

On the whole, Parker is too clumsily handled to really sing like it should, which is too bad, considering that this adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s crime novel character has nearly enough pulpy energy from which to work. The surplus of it nearly balances out the deficiencies elsewhere. A great deal of the charm comes from the considerable charisma of Jason Statham in the title role as Richard Parker, a cold, clever criminal who is seemingly unstoppable and, when wronged, will charge after those who did him in with ruthless efficiency. Westlake’s template has been put to use with lead actors in films as diverse as Lee Marvin in 1967’s Point Blank, Robert Duvall in 1973’s The Outfit, and Mel Gibson in 1999’s Payback. Clearly a showcase for charismatic actors of various and diverse kinds, Statham plays this character as a force of nature, muscling through this sharp-edged yet lethargic thriller with a steely focus and impeccable timing.

It all starts with a heist at the Ohio State Fair. Parker and his accomplices (Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, and Clifton Collins, Jr.) lift a couple million dollars and get away with it too. It’s during the getaway that things go south. Parker refuses to reinvest his share of the stolen money in a secondary heist opportunity, which leaves the others no choice but to shoot him and leave him for dead on the side of the road. But, as you might imagine, he’s not dead. He’s alive and kicking, leaving a trail of stolen cars on his way to get the money he’s owed and teach those backstabbers a lesson by out-planning them and heisting their next heist out from under them. To do so, he drives right into a tangle of fun character actors. The likes of Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez, Bobby Cannavale, and Patti LuPone do the kind of supporting work that zips in for a scene or two (or a dozen) and relieves Statham of only some of the pressure of holding up the film single-handedly.

With a plot that twists around quite nicely, it finds an uncomplicated nastiness and suspense that settles into the right groove from time to time. There are all kinds of theoretically enjoyable turns of violence and strategy, from double and triple crosses and elaborate ruses to simple improvisatory kills, like when one character stabs his attacker in the neck with a piece of a gun. I especially liked when one character breaks into a building, hides a couple of guns, and then waits for the narrative to eventually deposit all of the characters back in the building for a final confrontation. I’m being purposely vague here, since the bulk of the enjoyment in this movie comes from the who, what, and when of the heavy plotting. In John J. McLaughlin’s script, the dialogue is purely functional and the characters only types. What fun is here comes from the simple pulp pleasures.

That’s all well and good, but the film never really came together all the way for me. I had the distinct feeling that it was a movie that knew all the right notes, but had no idea how to get the tune to come out right. Directed by Taylor Hackford, a man capable of framing a serviceable shot, but who is otherwise held hostage by the quality of the scripts he’s given, the film plays out in smeary digital photography peppered with more than a handful of unacceptably poor quality establishing shots that look like they were shot with consumer grade camcorders in 2003. The simple what-you-see-is-what-you-get framing bobbles the tone and stretches the pacing until I felt like I had to slow down and let the movie catch up. This is the kind of B-movie that needed just a bit more of a push – maybe a rewrite or two? – in order to be as tight and nasty as it was so obviously aiming to be.