Monday at the Movies - June 2, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, two takes on Tennessee Williams!

Blue Jasmine (2013) – Woody Allen is nothing if not prolific, but the sheer volume of his work often means that every film can’t be a success.  Blue Jasmine – Allen’s post-recession take on A Streetcar Named Desire – is, however, a triumph; in fact, it’s probably his best in at least a decade.  In a powerhouse performance, Cate Blanchett stars as the eponymous Jasmine, at wit’s end after the imprisonment and death of her too-big-to-fail husband (Alec Baldwin).  To cope with her fall from grace, Jasmine lives part-time in a fantasy world while moving in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) and her boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale).  As this iteration’s Blanche Dubois, Blanchett puts the “pathos” back into “pathetic” and more than earns her Oscar; her Jasmine is scattered and schizophrenic, slipping between realities while never failing to tell the audience which version of the world she’s actually experiencing – her own or the real one.  The supporting cast, too, is very potent in this one; Louis CK turns up for a bumbling note of levity, Baldwin as Jasmine’s husband is more important to the story than Blanche’s ever was, and the decision to split the Stanley figure in two – Cannavale’s Chili and Andrew Dice Clay’s Augie.  This gives us a fuller sense of Ginger, liberated from a reductionist “Stanley bad” approach that might be encouraged by Brando’s thuggish performance.  For those who think the filmmaker has lost his touch, this is a fine example of Allen’s late style, contemplative and sobered.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) – Look, every now and again, I review a movie where all I can do is point to the decades of preexisting critical consensus and add little more to the discussion than to say, “Yeah, what they said.”  Case in point:  Elia Kazan’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play is nothing short of iconic.  While watching this tour de force rendition of the fall of Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh) in the home of her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) and Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), one feels distinctly that one is in the presence of a greatness which more than lives up to its reputation.  Every note-perfect beat in the film strikes a resonant chord with the audience, be it Leigh’s fragile beauty or the frankly inspired decision to film in black-and-white.  And when it comes to Brando’s mumbling hulk Stanley, you’re talking nothing short of definitive; he performs as though Williams’s pen had literally given birth to Stanley, fully formed like Athena from the foamy scalp of Zeus.  Readers of the playscript will be forgiven for thinking this is anyone’s show but Stanley’s, for he is everything you could want from a Stanley.  Kazan’s direction cements the place of the film in cinema history; his directorial sensibility lends a tragic inevitability to the proceedings, such that Stanley’s line “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning” becomes the distressing centerpiece to the play.  But the film, subject to the Hays Code, contains a slightly tweaked ending, a nuanced gesture toward a moral universe, which makes the film a distinctly unique experience when compared to the play.  It’s not Williams’s ending, that’s for sure – but it does make the film, in the final analysis, a masterpiece by Kazan.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, but come back on Saturday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month!