Blue Jasmine

Depending on the Kindness (Enabling) of Strangers
or
Being Entitled to Your Opinion

Blue Moon/You saw me standing alone/
Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own/
Blue Moon/You know just what I was there for/
You heard me saying a prayer for/Someone I really could care for/
And then there suddenly appeared before me/
The only one my arms will hold/
I heard somebody whisper please adore me/
And when I looked to the Moon it turned to gold
Blue Moon/Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own

Woody Allen's 21st century version of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blue Jasmine, is a contemporary version of the play's tragedy in an unsympathetic post-Bernie Madoff/Wall Street Bail-Out world, turning it into a moralistic comedy. It may seem a little misogynistic to be so mocking to someone as Williams' Blanche DuBois who has suffered a cataclysm, but when the someone is as cluelessly entitled and myopic as Allen's Jasmine (nee Jeanette) Francis (Cate Blanchett), there is a very real glee to see them get their, as the term is used in The Magnificent Ambersons, "comeuppance."

It's a brilliant conceit, combining Allen's love for classic literature and forms, tossing his own hang-dog spin onto it, while, for once, being refreshingly contemporary—something Allen hasn't really done of late, as he's had a depressive's obsession with the past for the past couple of decades (no matter how fresh the cast may be).

Allen starts his film (after the standard black background with white credits backed this time by '30's depression era rhythm and blues) with an (unusual for him) CGI shot of a jet approaching the camera, sailing by and moving away. Jasmine Francis ("I fell in love with the 'Jasmine.' 'Jeanette' has no panache") is on that jet flying from New York to San Francisco to move in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins—her second film for Allen) for a fresh start after losing everything in her life. They're both adopted and couldn't be more different (As Sally says "She got the good genes."); Jeanette is all high cheek-bones and au couture, while Sally is low class and all teeth, surrounded by Guido's and roughnecks. Jasmine has suffered a reversal of fortune as her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) has been caught wheeling and dealing in real estate schemes, ending up in prison, and committing suicide. Her extended visit delays Ginger's boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale) moving in with her and her two kids by Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), her ex-husband. There's a bit of a sandpaper quality to Ginger and Jasmine's relationship; when Ginger and Augie were married, they lost a lottery nest-egg investing in one of Hal's "get-rich-quick" investment schemes, something Jasmine forgets when she drama-queens over her own plight, and dismisses entirely when confronted with it.

Jasmine (Blanchett) and Ginger (Hawkins)

So it rankles when Jasmine pulls a Mrs. Madoff and claims victim-hood about the money she's lost. Jasmine has no plans, no prospects, and there are hints of a nervous breakdown after she was found wandering the streets talking to herself. Now, she's popping Xanax with a vodka chaser and barely keeping ahead of anxiety attacks and comatose fugue states as she barrels through the lower echelons of San Francisco, trying to latch onto opportunities.

She decides to go back to school, learning computers so she can go "into" interior design, taking a job at a dentist's (Michael Stuhlbarg)—for which she is totally ill-suited (anything with the words "customer" and "service" in any combination would be)—to fund the courses. In the meantime, from her lowly status, she lords it over the family and friends she finds beneath her. That meaning everyone.

The flip-side to this is that people still find her attractive, as she puts up a great, if shallow, front, speaking of her glory days—which segue into flashbacks of her privileged happy life, only to find that once the flashback has ended, that she's still carrying on the conversation inside the flashback, and whoever she was talking through previously has left.* It's a clever use of flashback as psychosis, a clever, nearly invisible off-shoot of the film-star (played by Jeff Daniels) stepping out of the film in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Where Allen has been living in the past the last few films, Jasmine is doing the same thing, to her detriment, as, whether in flashback or real life, it comes back to haunt her and take her away from the present and any future she might aspire to.

It's a return to near perfect form without the tricks and conceits that Allen used (during his "earlier, funny" films) and nicely merges the bi-polar extremes of comedy and tragedy that the more mature filmmaker in Allen has aspired to.  It also feels less fussy and musty than the after-taste some of the lesser Allen films have left of late. After a lifetime of making good films, some classic and some merely pedantic, and eschewing his earlier stylistic tricks, one wonders if, at the age of 78, Allen's best films might still be ahead of him and that's an exciting prospect.

Jasmine in her "fugue" state

* It's a bit like the Larry David monologues-to-the-camera in Whatever Works, only there's no child around to ask "Who's that man talking to, Mommy?"

The Secret Life of Pets

Neutered Pets
or
"...no biscuit."

The creators of Despicable Me have come out with a new semi-original movie The Secret Life of Pets and top-loaded it with an entertaining trailer. But, as lovely a film as Despicable Me was, it didn't deserve (unless you count the box office) a sequel or the flood of seemingly endless Minion knock-offs that generate thoughts of minion-cide. Directors Chris Renaud and Yarrow Cheney know a money-train when they see one and when they hit the jackpot they appear to stay at the same table in the hopes of another jackpot rather than count the diminishing returns.

So, it's a relief of sorts to see them come up with a new concept and The Secret Life of Pets seems to fill the bill. It is one of the mysteries of life what your quadruped friend does when you're absent. I, myself, suspected that my last animal was day-trading on the computer, while the less imaginative of us merely suspects that it's peeing on something. I've had the opportunity to watch my dog on an internet-fed closed-circuit of the doggy daycare he went to, and his behavior was, in the company of strangers, typical. He would shun attention, turning his back on the caretakers, but inch closer to them as if to say "I'm here, ya know. You could pay attention to me if you wanted to, not that I really want that, of course." 

My dog was an aggressive breed. But, he turned around to be passive-aggressive.

Renaud and Cheney exploit our curiosity with this movie. They start with a basic recap of the trailer—various domesticated's doing what we might suspect they'd do given thumbs—parakeets geeking out with flight simulators, cats exploiting privileges, including kitchen privileges, animals messing with our stuff for reasons that they would find practical, but mostly wasting time while we slave away to keep them kibbled. The two directors mine this stuff for laffs, occasionally straining the point where the behaviors of dogs belie their appearance—a snooty poodle hammers away to death-metal while his patron is away. Okay.

The film focuses on one dog, Max (voiced by Louis C.K.), devoted to his master Katie (Elle Kemper) to the point where he spends working hours staring at the door, waiting for the sound of her keys. If one is looking for The Secret Life of Pets, Max is the least interesting prospect. Then, inexplicably, Katie comes home with Duke (voiced by Eric Stonestreet) a very large, overpowering dog who has boundary issues, much the same as Max. They spend a restless night battling over territory. Okay. Conflict. Got it.

The next day, the two conspire against each other creating a Terrible Mess in which they're both on the street and eventually having to negotiate with The Society of Flushed Pets—a loose association of amazingly non-carnivorous animals, who are against the very concept of domestication, a concept I find hard to believe because most groups with an agenda have a tendency to eat their own (we are in the middle of an election cycle).

There begins a story of Duke and Max having to put aside their differences against adversity, while the other animals, who normally are living a sedentary life while their masters are away, go against their natures to bond to try and rescue their pals.

Maybe I'm being too discriminating (I am, after all, more than 12 years old) but that's the template for just about every animal cartoon that's been released to the unsuspecting public in the last few years. If the "Despicable/Minion" series hadn't shown Renaud and Cheney to be great proponents of recycling, then "Finding Max and Duke" The Secret Life of Pets shows them to not be innovative even when supposedly striking new ground.

In the criticism game, you're supposed to talk about the thing as is, not what you would want it to be, but this one has me wishing that the story they put out wasn't where they could have taken this. I would like to have seen more of that "secret life of pets" idea as put forth in the trailer. I doubt one could sustain it for the ninety minutes it would take to flesh out a feature, but it would have been better than spending the length of this movie wondering "why isn't this better?" and "Pixar might have done something worthwhile here, given a little strategic thinking." As it is, The Secret Life of Pets probably should have stayed secret.

Trumbo

Credits Where Credit Is Due
or
Black-marketing The Black List

You can't find a more dull subject for a movie than writers. The drama is always internal and only externalized by the image of fingers flying on keys in solitude. That's the writing. 

The drudgery gets even worse with the inevitable re-writing and the editing and the second thoughts that threaten to snuff the spark of creativity before it can ever turn to flame. It is only those things, the outside influences that keep a writer from writing, that make for good drama, whether it's drink or love or psychological terror.

Or people that don't like their work. Or their politics. Or them.

A writer not writing is far more dramatic than a writer who is.

For Dalton Trumbo, the roadblocks are manifest, but inconsequential to his output—nothing can stop a writer who loves to write, really, and Trumbo loved writing, as it was an expression of his ego and his own activist zeal. Not even being called to testify before HUAC and going to prison for contempt of Congress, being black-listed by quelling studio-heads bowing to pressure from Hollywood's right wing, he still managed to keep writing through a variety of means and psuedonyms and winning Oscars while doing so—Oscars that would take years before the nom de guerre used could be expunged and his own name could be acknowledged as the source. 

The subterfuge was that he was always an employable writer. It's just that no one could acknowledge they hired him to write, or they would be tarred with the same brush as a communist sympathiser. Lillian Hellman called it "Scoundreltime," where one hand did something while the public face lied about it. Trumbo was perfectly fine with playing that game and protecting those who stuck their necks out for him, as he had a family and he liked to eat.

Others were not so lucky. The stakes in the best of show business times are high and the opportunities slim, and producers are all "scared rabbits" (as the line goes in All About Eve) not willing to take a chance at minimizing their potential profits. And that's in the time of high confidence. In a time of fear, wagons will be circled and shutters drawn and phones unrung and unanswered, and in the product, there will always be the safest of happy endings, no matter how unlikely. It's a time of black and white, and anything gray is suspicious and untrustworthy.

Not that Trumbo—the real one, not the movie concoction—was comfortable in the gray zone, either. Even a casual glance at his work shows his screenplays were full of black/white-good/evil demarcations. Trumbo, the writer, couldn't help but make the antagonists of his heroes hissable with more than just bad intentions towards them. The prison guards in Papillon are sadistic, the nun who betrays him later in that movie is brittle and pharisaical. General Crassus in Spartacus is not only vain-glorious and opportunistic, but also bi-sexual (which was rather phobic for the liberal Trumbo, but even liberals in the 1950's could "protest too much" about masculinity). The real Trumbo wasn't afraid to stack the decks in his writing, rather than going a more subtler route. But that bluntness in thought and word could also create masterpieces like "Johnny Got His Gun" (which Trumbo himself directed for the screen in 1971), one of the most searing and uncompromising "anti-war" novels ever written.

In Jay Roach's Trumbo, Dalton Trumbo is portrayed with some of the warts and all—an affected, high-toned, pugnacious workaholic, with the air of high-minded authority (Bryan Cranston plays him with more than a bit of John Huston to him, probably to suggest that patrician attitude), loving of his family but will exploit them by bringing them in as workers in his script factory after he serves time in prison for "contempt of Congress" (which prompts a line another member of the Hollywood 10 employed) and finds himself blacklisted by the majority of Hollywood studios (who, in turn, are bullied by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals to not hire communists, lest their own immigrant status be highlighted in the press).

In a page right out of one of Trumbo's scripts, the Motion Picture Alliance is portrayed as a monolithic front, with far more power than they actually had. They used other people's power to intimidate. and they attacked through money and people's ability to earn it. All it would take to disarm them would be to simply stand up to them and defy them. Tellingly, the only one who does is one of its own members, John Wayne* (David James Elliott), and that's in a scene where he out-guffs Hedda Hopper (portrayed by Helen Mirren as if she were the Wicked Witch of West Hollywood) when she begins to threaten him for "going soft." That sounds a little "Hollywood" to me. But there's a lot of Hollywood in Trumbo, where, not unlike Hitchcock from a few years ago, they get the main story right, but they get the facts wrong.

The problems of several of the Hollywood Ten are heaped on the created character of Allen Hird (Louis C.K.), who is Trumbo's constant critic within "the Ten" ("You talk like a radical, but you live like a rich guy," Hird gripes at Trumbo after a group meeting discussing legal strategies. "The radical will lose," Trumbo parries back, "but the rich guy wins with the cunning of Satan"). Hird's story runs a parallel course to Trumbo's—conviction of contempt of Congress, imprisonment, no writing jobs, then becomes part of the writing mill that Trumbo creates for the King Brothers, a B-movie exploitation movie-maker that was the only studio that would employ them (It's been revealed that Trumbo wrote the classic Gun Crazy for the King Brothers in 1950). But even then, the fictional Hird can't help himself but try to throw in some left-leaning polemic in the basest of material. On top of that, he has issues in his private life and health issues that couldn't come at a worse time.

Trumbo, in the meantime, keeps writing. Obsessively, compulsively. Long into the night, and, when inspiration leaves, in his bathtub (a statue of him** writing in the bath was erected in Grand Junction, Colorado, not far from his hometown of Montrose), popping benzedrine, and making life strained at home. Still, despite being black-listed, he won two Oscars for his work, which were credited to "fronts" or psuedonyms—Roman Holiday and The Brave One—until there was a competition between Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger over who would actually name him as their pictures' screen-writer (and get the credit for "breaking" the black-list). Even when Spartacus—Douglas' picture—came out, it was picketed by the American Legion, until John Kennedy finally made the issue of Trumbo's black-listing moot by crossing the picket lines to see the film while President. The only way to fight a conspiracy is another conspiracy, like a back-fire. The fact that Spartacus made a lot of money for Universal Pictures helped, too.

Trumbo is worthwhile in that it gets the story out, if not right. Performances are solid from the main characters (although I have problems with Cranston's affected performance) and John Goodman is a stand-out—again playing another Hollywood producer, as he did with The Artist and Argo—but the film does a bit of a disservice to the times, almost making those times a "Hollywood problem." 

 

It wasn't. It just got more of the publicity, where a lot of the battles took place. There is no triumph in Trumbo—as close as it gets is an odd shot where his Spartacus credit is reflected in his glasses, which feels oddly unimportant in the scope of it all. But, there's no real sense of the over-arching tragedy as dissent was punished and the wildly hysterical was given credence. Maybe that's why it doesn't register much, emotionally or psychologically. It feels too much like today.

* And I'm not sure I'm even buying that one. Wayne was a righteous anti-communist, no doubt about it (and no doubt because he was one of the few male stars who sat out World War II in Hollywood—something his mentor, John Ford, never let him forget). He was proud of it. And he had a hand in destroying many a career in Hollywood during the 1950's. Conversely, once The Red Scare had passed, he held no grudges—blacklisted screenwriter Marguerite Roberts was sure Wayne would reject her script for True Grit, but he surprised her when he told the producers "Don't touch a word. It's perfect." But, Trumbo would have you believe that Wayne was the only person in Hollywood who stood up to Hedda Hopper. Not buying it. And I'm not buying how Edward G. Robinson (played by the ubiquitous Michael Stuhlbarg that doesn't suggest Robinson at all) is portrayed as naming names. He never did. And even though David James Eliott looks nothing like Wayne, he still has the voice and bearing perfectly, whereas Dean O' Gorman, who resembles Kirk Douglas, doesn't recall the actor at all.

**