I seem to have a tendency to take Woody Allen somewhat for granted, purely as a film director. Walking home from the theater, I thought "this is his best movie since...", and it turns out you really don't have to go back too far: "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" to "Match Point" to "Sweet and Lowdown" to "Husbands and Wives" to "Crimes and Misdemeanors" to "Hannah and Her Sisters", and pretty soon you get to "Manhattan": that is a very formidable roster of great movies, and there have been some darn good movies interspersed between those high points. It's just that, as Grandma Woody tells Ed Chigliak in that episode of "Northern Exposure", Woody seems to have a compulsion to keep making movies ("the same movie, over and over and over again...it's not healthy!"), so inevitably the occasional clunker ("Celebrity", "Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy", "Everyone Says I Love You", "Scoop") is bound to happen. This film, I am happy to report, ranks in the upper echelon of Woody's best. We San Franciscans, as I have frequent cause to mention, are a provincial lot; it has been decades since I have seen a theater as full for one of Woody's movies as the Clay Theatre was tonight. We love to see ourselves on screen, and to be fair, it is rare for a movie set here to be worth the price of a ticket. This film fits well into San Francisco: South Van Ness, West Portal, Ocean Beach, The Ramp, Marina Green, South Park, even (God help us!) Rivera and 48th Avenue all form plausible backdrops to the action. The acting is all first rate. The male characters are all inherently flawed, if not downright despicable; Alec Baldwin gives a fine, understated performance as a Bernie Madoff type sleazebag, and Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Dice Clay do nice turns as the lummoxes that Sally Hawkins' character is drawn to. But really, the movie belongs to the two female leads: two of the actors I am always ready to pay money to see, Sally Hawkins and Cate Blanchett. Cate Blanchett steps right into the role Judy Davis has been playing in Woody's films, and she absolutely runs with. Her final scene, on a bench in South Park, with wet hair and no makeup, just sort of sticks to one's ribs. And I will confess that when Jasmine asks "Who do I have to sleep with to get a vodka Martini with lemon twist?", my hand shot up in the air before I could consider that the question may well have been rhetorical, and that Cate Blanchett couldn't actually see me.
Review of Blue Jasmine
