BLUE JASMINE 2013

By now I'm convinced that Woody Allen could shoot a science fiction film on the surface of the moon and it would still come out looking as though it took place in New York.

As filmmakers go, Allen is a little like those American tourists who travel all around the world only to Westernize the experience: staying at American chain hotels, eating American food, interacting with other American tourists, and insisting on speaking only English. Ever since Allen went to the UK in 2005 to remake Crimes and Misdemeanors…I mean, to film Match Point; critics have been falling over themselves praising the revitalizing effect locations like France, Spain, and Italy have had on his work. I've seen almost every Woody Allen film since 1969s Take the Money & Run, and I have to say, these newer off-the-continent films of his feel more like General Foods International Coffees retreads of his usual stuff.
But just as one resigns oneself to copious amounts of rear-screen projection when one seeks a Hitchcock film, it comes with the territory (so to speak) that no matter where a Woody Allen film takes place; you're going to get Manhattan.

I've been entertained by, but haven't really liked, a Woody Allen film since 1996s Everyone Says I Love You). And in spite of my fond feelings for Annie Hall, Radio Days, Manhattan Murder Mystery, September, Broadway Danny Rose, and The Purple Rose of Cairo, the only Allen film I think of with much affection is Love and Death (1975), and that's chiefly because it's so silly and wall-to-wall funny.

But a lot of that changed for me with Blue Jasmine. In this film, Allen balances the humor with the drama in a way that feels remarkably unforced. And while set both in Allen's beloved New York and a strange, Allen-esque version of San Francisco where all the working-class people speak with Jersey accents; it nevertheless is one of the first Woody Allen films in I don't know how long that has taken me by surprise. In addition, I believe it's the only Allen film I've ever been moved by. His most urgent, vivid film in years, Blue Jasmine teems with an energy I haven't felt in any of the director's recent going-through-the-motions efforts, and thanks to the monumental performance of Cate Blanchett, becomes a kind of flawless portrait of human weakness.  

Cate Blanchett as  Jasmine "Jeanette" Francis

Sally Hawkins as Ginger

Bobby Cannavale as Chili

Alec Baldwin as Hal Francis

Peter Sarsgaard as Dwight Westlake

Andrew Dice Clay as Augie

In this tale of a chic New York socialite (Jasmine, née Jeanette) whose life falls apart after her husband’s fraudulent financial schemes lead to the abrupt dissolution of both her marriage and her tenuous grip on reality; Allen, as is his wont, disavows any intentional allusions to either the Bernie Madoff case or Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Don't you believe it.
Destitute, disgraced, and more than a little delusional (the penniless Park Avenuer still travels First Class, dresses in Chanel, and convoys a cluster of Louis Vuitton luggage); Jasmine is forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. More specifically, the kindness of the estranged. Jasmine's reversal of fortune makes it necessary for her to relocate to San Francisco to live in a manner she’d really rather not grow accustomed to with her adoptive sister Ginger, a working-class divorcee with two kids and a taste for tinpot Stanley Kowalskis guys who speak in dese, dems, and dose (cue the Ed Hardy clothing and Jersey Shore douchebag haircut).

"Tip big, boys. Tip big because you get good service."
Jasmine, who has fallen on extremely hard times and in minutes will tell her sister she's "Worse than tapped out," thinks nothing of tipping a cab driver $100  

Years spent living a princess’ privileged existence on Long Island and Park Avenue have left Jasmine singularly ill-equipped for coping with the steady bombardment of class-based culture shocks and workplace wake-up calls she encounters in her attempts to start a new life. Attempts thwarted by her own deluded sense of entitlement; a tendency to zone out and talk to herself; and a crippling nervous anxiety she medicates with fistfuls of Xanax washed down with Stoli martinis with a twist of lemon.
As flashbacks reveal the contradictory reality behind the veils of illusion, self-invention and self-deception Jasmine relies upon to get through the day, we come to better understand not only the poisonous, disruptive effect she has on those around her, but ultimately how her self-sabotaging ways have caused her to be the instrument of her own destruction.

Blue Jasmine brings thorny cringe-comedy and a surprisingly unflinching emotional intensity (especially for a Woody Allen film) to an irresistible premise that set class tensions, familial rivalry, accountability, guilt, remorse, ethics, consequence, and identity as the backdrops for a character study of an intriguingly neurotic woman hanging to life by a tether.

"I want to get my degree and become, you know, something substantial!"
Penniless and possessing zero marketable skills, Jasmine is forced to take a "menial" position as a dentist's receptionist

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Blue Jasmine has many terrific things going for it from the outset, starting with the jittery and highly unreliable narrator that is Jasmine French (she’s so unreliable we don’t even know if French is her real maiden name or one she made up). Embodying as she does the very worst of the kind of upscale New Yorker Woody Allen vacillates between admiring and resenting (think Interiors), a great deal of pleasure is derived from seeing this insufferable, Paltrowesque snob brought low by her shallow self-centeredness. But the beauty of the script (and Blanchett’s performance) is that our attitude toward Jasmine grows into something resembling, if not sympathy, then perhaps empathy. Empathy in direct proportion how little of her fragile sense of self the film is willing to leave her with. She's a difficult, largely unlikeable character, but it's surprising how much I found myself just hoping she could stay out of her own way long enough to pull herself out of the mess she'd created.

The Times of Your Life

I love the narrative structure of Blue Jasmine. Half of the film's most compelling dramatic and comedic conflicts arise out of the forced social interaction of radically dissimilar characters with conflicting/opposing objectives. The second half is like a forensic psychology dissection of Jasmine's earlier life, exposing the glaring and telling discrepancies between reality and the kind of desperate, blinkered survivalism that lay behind Jasmine's penchant for turning a blind eye to everything...particularly herself.

Jasmine in Happier Times
A vision of the morally poisonous allure of wealth worthy of Fitzgerald, Dreiser, or Flaubert

PERFORMANCES

When Cate Blanchett was awarded the 2014 Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Blue Jasmine, she always made it a point to thank Woody Allen for his screenplay. I specify screenplay and not performance because, based on everything I've read, Allen is one of those hands-off directors who leave actors to shape their performances for themselves.

I’ve already expressed the opinion that Woody Allen doesn’t really do anything but Woody Allen, and on paper, Jasmine is just another in a long list of his fragile, flinty neurotic females. Had he written it in the '90s, more than likely she would be played by Judy Davis; the '80s, Mia Farrow; the '70s, Diane Keaton. Jasmine isn't anyone Allen hasn't introduced us to many times before; it's just that in the very capable hands of Cate Blanchett, she turns a Woody Allen "type" into a real person. Arguably the first real person ever to inhabit a Woody Allen movie.

Another Man, Another Chance
Jasmine's sister, Ginger, meets nice guy, Al (Louis C.K.) 

The Australian-born Blanchett (who in 2009 appeared in a Liv Ullmann directed production of A Streetcar Named Desire) is as affecting with the scenes requiring stylish élan as she is in the scenes revealing Jasmine’s rapid mental and emotional deterioration. Blanchett is genuinely heartbreaking in these moments, the sprawling messiness of her character’s inability to grab hold of anything real within herself, single-handedly redeeming some of Allen’s more familiar and clichéd bits. (Allen exhibits no feel at all for San Francisco – which very well may be the point – and seems most in his element when giving voice, through Jasmine, to a certain obliviousness as to how regular people go about the business of living without benefit of buckets of money).

Cate Blanchett - Armani spokesmodel and Vogue fashion plate (top) - has a look ideally suited to credibly portray an elegant member of New York's elite super-rich. Playing a character whose identity and sense of self-worth has always been wrapped up in how others perceive her, Blanchett is at her most poignant when showing us a woman struggling not to let others see how hard she's fighting to maintain what is essentially a steadily crumbling facade.


THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Outside of Blanchett’s amazing performance, one of the major reasons I've come to rate Blue Jasmine as my #1 favorite Woody Allen film is because it deals with so many of the themes and subthemes I tend to seek out in movies. I've always been drawn to human-scale stories that hold the potential for emotional violence (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnage, Reflections in a Golden Eye), so a combustible character drama with plenty of strained conversations and heated exchanges like Blue Jasmine is practically an action film to me.

Jasmine's ideal life turns out to be anything but

I also love movies that ask us to examine our culture of wealth-worship and the American success myth (The Day of the Locust, A Place in the Sun), and why it is so many of us are willing to trade our souls and compromise our ideals in their pursuit.

"But a cheat is a cheat."
Jasmine's ethical code goes MIA when she gets the opportunity to start anew with
European diplomat Dwight, a "substantial" man of wealth and position  

I've a weakness for films that dramatize our limitless capacity for fooling ourselves, and not since Shelley Duvall's Millie Lammoreaux in Robert Altman's 3 Women has there been a more absorbing depiction of delusional behavior run amok than Blanchett's Jasmine French.

Struggling to find the line between reinvention and self-deception

Although it's Blanchett's show all the way, the entire cast of Blue Jasmine turn in impressive performances. Particularly English actress Sally Hawkins, who was so terrific in Allen's underrated Cassandra's Dream (2007), and Bobby Cannavale, who I liked so much in Annie. (I recently saw the film, Lovelace and enjoyed seeing both Cannavale and Peter Sarsgaard - who share no scenes in Blue Jasmine - in the cast).


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
At 79, Woody Allen is a filmmaker clearly out of touch in a lot of not-so-great ways: as usual, the only substantial roles for blacks you’ll find in Blue Jasmine are on the film's jazz soundtrack (there's something very Jasmine-like about Allen's love of black culture and antipathy for its people); but as one of the few directors still working with real people (not action figures), in actual locations (OK, so everyplace feels like New York, at least it’s not green screen), with stories that are actually about something…Woody Allen is also old-fashioned in a lot of ways that got me interested in film in the first place.
Which is to say, by recalling the bravura, female-centric dramas and character studies like Klute, A Woman Under the Influence, Images, and Diary of a Mad Housewife; Blue Jasmine feels like a film made in the 1970s. And if you're at all aware of my fondness for that decade, cinematically speaking, you'll know that I couldn't give a film a bigger compliment.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015

BLACK WIDOW 1954

Today to get the public to attend a picture show,

It’s not enough to advertise a famous star they know.

If you want to get the crowds to come around...

You’ve got to have Glorious Technicolor,

Breathtaking CinemaScope,

And Stereophonic Sound.

Cole Porter -1955 Broadway musical "Silk Stockings"

“The first big murder-mystery in CinemaScope!” “The first crime-of-passion story in CinemaScope!" Thus screamed the poster and newspaper ads heralding the 1954 release of 20th Century-Fox’s all-star, all-color, widescreen film noir, Black Widow. Well, seeing as I somehow managed to never even hear of this movie until just last year, I’m going to have to take them at their word that Black Widow represents a series of "firsts" in the annals of CinemaScope. What I can attest to is that by combining the backstage bitchery of All About Eve (1950) with the murder-mystery-told-in-flashback structure of Laura (1944), and burnishing it all to a garish, high-gloss color palette reminiscent of How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Black Widow succeeds in being a pleasingly campy goulash of disparate genre tropes and style conventions in search of a unifying tone.

Ginger Rogers as overbearing diva of the New York stage Carlotta Marin

Van Heflin as slow-witted theatrical producer Peter Denver

Gene Tierney as patrician stage star Iris Denver

George Raft as the Beau Brummel of the NYPD, Detective Lt. C.A. Bruce

Peggy Ann Garner as  Southern-fried "purpose girl" Nancy Ordway

Reginald Gardiner as lapdog househusband Brian Mullen

Given the big push by 20th Century-Fox in order to compete with the escalating popularity of television, CinemaScope, like today’s mania for 3-D (that ship has struck dry-dock by now, hasn't it?), is a technological advancement devised to enhance the moviegoing experience that doesn't necessarily translate to enhancing the quality of the film itself. In its time CinemaScope was a spectacle-based invention which proved ideal for epics (The Robe – 1953), musicals (There's  No Business Like Show Business – 1954), and scenic adventure films (Beneath the 12-Mile Reef – 1953). Black Widow, a murder mystery based on the novel Fatal Woman by Hugh Wheeler (of A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd fame) was an early experiment by Fox to try out its widescreen process (with blistering color by Deluxe) on a less visual, more narrative-driven genre.

Set in the glamorous world of the New York theater (although no one in the film ever sets foot on a stage), Black Widow feels more like Americanized Agatha Christie than full-blown noir. It throws together a colorful assortment of cliché Broadway luminaries, bigwigs, hangers-on, and bohemian Greenwich Village types, then stands back as this close-knit group of professional pretenders grows progressively unraveled by the inconvenient intrusion of a murder into their cloistered enclave. 

Virginia Leith as Claire Amberly
Although I always associate Leith with Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying (1956), fans of MST3K will recognize Leith as the disembodied talking head in 1962s The Brain that Wouldn't Die

While Black Widow is built around the noir staple of an innocent person having their life spiral out of control due to being falsely accused of a crime, missing-in-action is the hard-boiled dialogue and requisite climate of fatalism necessary to make this overlit whodunit feel like the real thing. Not helping matters is the fact that time which would have been better spent fleshing out character motivations and plot twists is given over to draggy amateur sleuthing that leans heavily on coincidence and relies too often on slow-witted police work.

Skip Homeier as John Amberly

Plot: Naive to the point of thick-headed Broadway producer Peter Denver (Heflin) befriends guileless 20-year-old wannabe writer Nancy Ordway (Garner) while his stage star wife (Tierney) is out of town. Although their friendship is platonic nature, it nevertheless raises the manicured eyebrows of Denver's neighbor, Great Lady of the Stage and all-around busybody Carlotta Marin (Rogers), despite the demurred assertions of her cowed husband, Brian (Gardiner), Denver's best pal.

At the periphery of this innocent but potentially combustible situation are: well-heeled sister and brother, Claire and John Amberly (Virginia Leith and Skip Homeier)--she a slumming Greenwich Village artist, he a law student; Nancy’s uncle Gordon (Otto Kruger), a low-tier stage actor; Anne (Hilda Simms), Nancy's sharp-as-a-tack co-worker; Lucia Colletti (Cathleen Nesbitt), the Denver's loose-lipped maid; and, once things take a nasty turn, Lt. Bruce (Raft), the steel-eyed, near-immobile detective.

Otto Kruger as Gordon Ling

The mystery at the core of Black Widow is handled fairly effectively, what with some throw-us-off-the-scent casting and a perhaps unintended lightness of touch helping to generate a few genuinely unexpected twists along the way. Also working in the film's favor is how the duplicitous and ruthless world of show business turns out to be a mystery-friendly environment rife with the potential for homicide.
And I certainly can't find fault with the production itself, it being a veritable cavalcade of stagy sets, overdone fashions, and rife with what was apparently a '50s hair vogue: The poodle cut - those unflatteringly short perms resembling gold-hued bathing caps made of tense, lambswool curls.

But in the end, neither the dark promise of the film's title, nor the camp excesses suggested by its gaudy visuals are ever realized in sufficient force to make Black Widow more than a handsomely mounted, slightly overdressed crime thriller.

Cathleen Nesbitt as Lucia Colletti

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It isn't common for a film’s greatest strengths to be found in its weaknesses, but Black Widow is frequently at its most persuasive when serving up a brand of moviemaking so glossily old-fashioned, its patently theatrical artificiality begins to take on the characteristic of something resembling a style.

From the outset, Black Widow embarks on a narrative course endorsing a mode of dress (the crisp, stiff clothes look like costumes), setting (95% soundstage, 5% NYC locations), and performance (all indication, little believable emotion), all supporting the theory of a concentrated effort on the film’s part to bear as little resemblance to real life as possible.
There's an alien "otherness" to the look of the film created by the lighting and composition requirements of the CinemaScope process. A process that turns New York into a sterile and oddly spacious environment (a basement Greenwich Village coffeehouse looks to be roughly the size of an airplane hangar) which puts it at direct odds with the kind of shadowy claustrophobia one associates with film noir.

The sort of natural, laid-back blocking CinemaScope made necessary

I sound like I'm complaining, but honestly (and this may be mere perversion on my part) I found the discordant visual tone to actually work to Black Widow’s advantage. Based on its initial scenes and not knowing anything about the film before I saw it, I thought Black Widow was going to be a light romantic drama. One of those '50s “woman’s pictures” combining elements of All About Eve (Tallulah Bankhead was first approached for the Ginger Rogers role), The Moon is Blue (that film’s star, Maggie McNamara, was first choice for the Peggy Ann Garner role), or a continuation of Rogers’ own Forever Female (1953) - another age-centric rivalry set in the world of theater.

That these posh surroundings, pretty people, and harmlessly waggish conversations are setting the stage for a murder mystery took me totally by surprise. And so it remained throughout: Black Widow's key lit, musical comedy sheen works at such amusing variance with what one has come to expect from noirish suspense thrillers that it inadvertently serves as a device to keep the audience off balance.

Mabel Albertson (left), known to scores of classic TV fans as the smothering mother figure on Bewitched, That Girl, and The Andy Griffith Show, gets a chance to let her hair down (and, by the looks of it, her bosom) as Sylvia, the tough-broad proprietress of a Greenwich Village hangout

PERFORMANCES

Beyond the musicals she made with Fred Astaire, I’m not enough of a fan of top-billed Ginger Rogers to know if the divinely catty character she plays in Black Widow is as much a departure from type as it seems. She has always displayed a charming brassiness in films like Stage Door and Golddiggers of 1933, so perhaps this isn't that much of a stretch, but with Van Heflin’s one-note performance and the obvious fragility of Gene Tierney (the actress was in the early throes of a mental breakdown during filming), Ginger Rogers' flamboyant energy is a godsend. Plus, she gets all the best lines.

In a role that amounts to little more than a bit part, Broadway actress Hilda Simms
gives the most natural, convincing performance in the entire film

For former child star Peggy Ann Garner (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Black Widow was a a bid for adult legitimacy on par with Patty Duke's Valley of the Dolls...and it proved to  be just about as successful. Given grief by critics at the time for not being a believable "type," I think she succeeds in the role chiefly for that reason. Garner's Nancy Ordway is a far more convincing babe-in-the-woods on the make than, say, Anne Baxter's brazenly transparent Eve Harrington in All About Eve.

Pretty much the entire arc of Van Heflin's character

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

To convey the grand style of the New York theater folk at the center of Black Widow, 20^th Century-Fox designer William Travilla whips up a drag queen's wet dream of ostentatious outfits for Ginger Rogers to parade around in. Happily, the longtime dancer is physically up to the task.

Carlotta - "To put the kindest face possible on it, the girl was a little horror. A transparent, syrupy little phony with about as much to offer a man as 'cuckoo the bird girl.' Not even Peter with all of his radiant innocence about women could have been stirred for one instant by that dingy little creep."

Peter - "Lottie, the girl is dead!"

Carlotta - "I know...and that’s precisely why I refuse to speak harshly of her!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

For a movie written, produced, and directed by a single individual (Nunnally Johnson of How to Marry a Millionaire, The Grapes of Wrath, The World of Henry Orient, etc.) Black Widow distinguishes itself by being almost completely lacking in distinction. Polished, well-made, and not nearly as vulgar as one might hope given the subject matter, Black Widow looks and feels like Hollywood product, circa 1954, that could have been directed by any number of studio contract professionals.

The tall, lanky fellow holding his hat is future TV producer Aaron Spelling.
Gene Tierney's health problems while making Black Widow necessitated her being seated in virtually all of her scenes  

And perhaps that's why, for all its slick competence, Black Widow never coalesces into more than just a pleasantly diverting way to  spend 95 minutes. A crime-of-passion movie without passion is a cold affair indeed, and Black Widow, while lovely to look at and fun in a detached sort of way (imagine absent-mindedly playing a game of "Clue") is ultimately most rewarding as a time-capsule view of Hollywood in its final years before it was forced to change in the mid-1960s.

Never intended to break new ground, Black Widow - a 40s noir retrofitted with color and CinemaScope - is but an example of 1950s Hollywood trying to hold onto its audience by giving them brighter and shinier versions of what they've always given them. Sorta like today today's digital, HD, CGI, 3-D opuses.

The black widow, deadliest of all spiders, earned its dark title through its deplorable practice of devouring its mate. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

ANNIE 2014

Given that my accepted mindset on the topic of most contemporary films (remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings, in particular) is a resounding, “Bah, humbug!” I have to say, after seeing the new version of Annie starring Quvenzhané Wallis and Jamie Foxx, I feel a little like Albert Finney in the last reel of Scrooge (1970).

Certainly, what with all those negative reviews, poor boxoffice, and my own casual antipathy toward the source material itself  ‒ I love the musical score, but my very W.C. Fields-like aversion to hordes of singing children has always prevented Annie from being a huge favorite ‒ expectations couldn't have been lower. I would have been happy had this, the third screen incarnation of the 1977 Broadway musical, been made into a splashy, tolerably bad movie musical on par with Hairspray (2007) or Nine (2009); and if I’m really being honest with myself, I think I might have even secretly hoped for a so-bad-it’s-good hoot-fest, à la Lost Horizon (1973) or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978). But as it turns out, Annie: 2014 caught me completely off guard. It seems the one thing I wasn’t expecting was an utterly delightful, thoroughly enchanting musical whose thoughtful and canny updating reclaims the heart of a musical long lost to shrill children’s recitals and hollow theatrical revivals.

I’m light-years away from being the film’s preferred demographic, but as a dancer and longtime fan of movie musicals, I was wholly captivated by Annie’s old-fashioned charm and sentimentality. A sentimentality that touchingly reaffirms the musical’s simple message that everybody needs to feel loved, and family isn't only something you’re born into.

Quvenzhane Wallis as Annie Bennett

Jamie Foxx as William Stacks

Rose Byrne as Grace Farrell

Cameron Diaz as Colleen Hannigan

Bobby Cannavale as Guy

David Zayas as Lou

With two flawed Annie adaptations already committed to celluloid (the overstuffed 1982 film you can read about HERE, and the wan but more faithful-to-the-stage 1999 TV-movie), I was less than thrilled when, back in 2011, actor Will Smith announced plans to produce an Annie remake starring his daughter, Willow. Of course, now, three years later, we can all give thanks for the role growth spurts and sluggish pre-production played in averting that particular disaster, but still, who needed yet another screen incarnation of that irrepressible orphan unless in a significantly reinterpreted form?

Happily, Annie 2014 proves to be just that: a surprisingly funny, disarmingly sweet update of the Broadway musical which, through the clever repurposing of songs, characters, and situations draws amusingly apt parallels between contemporary times and the hard knock life of 1933. 

Quvenzhané Wallis’ Annie has the spirit, spunk, and boundless optimism of her comic strip namesake (not to mention the same headful of curly locks), and plot-wise, the film cleaves more to the 1982 John Huston film than the original Broadway production written by Thomas Meehan (with music composed by Charles Strouse and lyricist Martin Charnin). But in spite of the many changes, it’s still the story of a hopeful waif searching for her real parents, and how she comes to warm the capitalist heart of a lonely billionaire through pluck and a cheery outlook. Annie is no longer an orphan, but (more reasonably) a foster child in the resentful care of the embittered, frequently besotted Miss Hannigan (Diaz), a failed dance-pop singer who was unceremoniously dumped from the C + C Music Factory back in the 90s (“I was too good!”) and now has to live off the subsidy income of playing foster mom to five annoying “little girls.”

Daddy Warbucks is now William Stacks (Foxx), a New York mayoral candidate whose standoffish public image is in dire need of the kind of PR rebranding and instant photo-op warmth temporarily taking in a foster kid can provide. Stacks is looked after by Grace Farrell (Byrne), the super-efficient VP of his mobile phone empire, and Guy (Cannavale), his pitbull of a political adviser. Beyond the narrative tweaks necessary to usher what is essentially a 90-year-old character into the 21st Century, Annie follows along the same fairy-tale path as its Broadway-inspired predecessors, retaining just enough of the familiar to evoke nostalgia, yet delivering plenty of (welcome) surprises to make the entire enterprise feel like something entirely fresh and new.

Granted, Annie is not a perfect film and not without its problems. Cameron Diaz’s over-caffeinated approach to the character of Miss Hannigan takes some getting used to (maybe small children will find her funny), events occasionally feel rushed (I know I'm alone in this, but I could have stood a longer running time), and like many musicals that strive to be “of the moment” (Xanadu, anyone?), Annie is in grave danger of looking dated by the time I post this. But in all, I found Annie to be a an fun, enjoyably tuneful re-imagining of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie (“Foster kid...” as the certain-her-parents-are-still-alive Annie has to keep reminding everyone) which, thanks in large part to the engaging performance of its adorable 10-year-old star, had me feeling (to quote Scrooge in Dickens' A Christmas Carol) "...as merry as a schoolboy."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In this day of Disney animation and Muppets, live-action movie musicals are hard to come by. Rarer still is the screen adaptation of a beloved Broadway musical that avoids succumbing to the curse of having too keen a sense of its own legacy. Camelot, My Fair Lady, and Hello, Dolly!, and Mame were all perfectly fun, lighthearted Broadway shows which arrived on the big screen ponderously weighed-down by big-for-big-sake elephantitis and an overdetermined sense of  their own “greatness.”

As a fan of cinematic bloat, I adore Annie’s visual sweep and glossy sumptuousness (it’s like a shiny, jewel-box vision of New York), and I like a large-scale musical number as much as the next guy (OK, probably more). But if I had to choose between the two, I much prefer an adaptation that pokes fun of itself with wry, self-aware humor, and which doesn't allow its heart to be smothered by all the production razzle-dazzle.

It's to the latter point where I think Annie succeeds most admirably. This is the first Annie I've ever seen scaled down to a size appropriate to the perspective of its heroine. And whether motivated by budgetary constraints or the dancing limitations of its cast, Annie sidesteps big production numbers at every turn (“It’s a Hard Knock Life” is almost modest) and in doing so, proves that less is consistently more. 

With intimacy intensified by the New York locations, the actors all doing their own singing, and the “dancing” consisting more of spontaneous movement inspired by the nature of the characters themselves; this Annie is the first one that I ever found to be really funny, and definitely the only Annie that has ever moved me to waterworks.

I thought by now I'd had my fill of the song, Tomorrow, until I heard Quvenzhane Wallis sing it. The staging of the number is very moving and her performance is outstanding. What a sweet voice she has!

PERFORMANCES

Impressive adaptation choices aside (I love the comically self-referential opening sequence that cleverly addresses the remake elephant in the room), Annie’s major asset is Academy Award-nominee Quvenzhané Wallis (and Golden Globe nominee for this) who is fast proving herself a child actress force to be reckoned with. There’s nothing comic book about the astonishing level of nuance she’s able to bring to a character usually summed up with a few glib adjectives built around the word, "spunky."

As realized by Wallis, Annie's belief that her parents will one day return for her is as movingly and realistically conveyed as her self-protective resilience is poignant. to bring this to a musical in which she also shines in the most engaging fashion in the comedy and musical sequences is something of a marvel. Having never Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild, the film that made her the youngest Best Actress nominee in history (she was nine), I can only say that I was fairly blown away by her display of talent here. Easily the best performance in the film, she’s an Annie for the ages.

Wallis' performance of the original song, "Opportunity" was a real goosebump moment for me. Wonderful to hear a child sing in a voice that actually sounds like that of a child, not a pint-sized Ethel Merman 

Cognizant perhaps of the indomitable juggernaut posed by the pairing of an absurdly charismatic child and a dog, Jamie Foxx wisely underplays as Stacks and comes off the all better for it (although one wonders what he thought when, rather prophetically, his big solo, "Something Was Missing" did just that in the release print). Rose Byrne is a standout and singularly appealing as Grace, the lonely-little-girl-as-grown-up spin given her character making for a nice subtextural trifecta (with Hannigan) about women/girls accepting themselves as individuals worthy of love by first learning to love themselves. Bobby Cannavale, so wonderful in last years's Blue Jasmine adds considerable comic verve to his role, David Zayas is solid as a local bodega owner harboring a love-has-20/20-eyesight crush on Hannigan, and Stephanie Kurtzuba as a wealth-struck social services worker is a scene-stealing highlight.

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Oz, Pompeii) as Nash, Stacks' driver/bodyguard

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I don't consider myself a big admirer of most of today's music (I think Miss Hannigan and I share similar musical tastes) but I was immediately taken with like the ingenious way the songs from Annie were reworked. I even like the new stuff (save for Moonquake Lake, which is a tad trying). I've read critics calling out the film for its Autotune sweetening of the vocals (a staple of every Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus song I've ever heard, and evident in 2010s Burlesque with little comment), but I'd rather have the "assisted" vocals of the real actors than the kind of rampant dubbing that occurred throughout the 60s.
And what is a musical without a favorite number? Annie has several standouts for me but my fave rave and the one number I can watch again and again is "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here." 

Grace & Annie make like Mick Jagger and David Bowie in the infectiously upbeat, 
"I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
As much as I absolutely fell in love with this film (flaws, bad reviews, and all) and think Annie batted it out of the ballpark in a way I never would have anticipated given my general distaste for remakes; I've become an even bigger fan of the film after the daughters of a friend of mine told me what it felt like to see a little girl who looked like them starring in her own bigscreen musical adventure.
Hearing how excited they were about Quvenzhané Wallis’ singing and dancing, how much they liked her hair, her mode of dress, and how it made them cry at the end....
It just got me to thinking about what a difference a film like this would have made to my sisters when we were growing up. I have four sisters and we went to the movies nearly every weekend when we were kids, yet in all the dozens of movies we saw, they never got the chance to see themselves represented onscreen. Certainly not front and center.

In researching this post, I came across a press junket video interview for Annie in which actor Bobby Cannavale had this to say on the topic: “It’s for a new generation of kids who wouldn't necessarily see themselves in those old productions, be it the movies or the play. I recently saw the play and I still didn't see anybody of color up there. So I think it’s an important thing for kids to be able to go to the movies and see themselves.”

I've always felt that dreams are what movies are for. And as Xanadu proved in my life, a movie doesn't have to be a critic's darling to inspire a person and speak to their spirit. So my hat is off to Annie for giving a lot of kids who aren't always afforded the chance, an opportunity to dream.

Black pearl, precious little girl
Let me put you up where you belong.

Black pearl, pretty little girl
You’ve been in the background much too long.

Black Pearl-1969 (Spector, Wine, Levine)

BONUS MATERIAL

As in the 1982 film (not the show), Annie is taken to the movies. In this instance, an intentionally silly-looking Twilight parody titled MoonQuake Lake, whose fake trailer can be seen (complete with surprise cameos) HERE. Sadly, as with all good parodies, it actually looks very much like a film that would be greenlit by Hollywood today.

Clip of the "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here" number on YouTube.

I read that Annie director, Will Gluck, placed 30 tributes to past versions of Annie in this film. I haven't found a site which lists them all, but here's a start:
1. The spunky, red-haired "Annie A." who opens the film giving a class report on Herbert Hoover (the Depression era President who's the topic of a sarcastic song in the Broadway show). 2. "Annie B." follows with a oral report on FDR and his New Deal (President referenced in song in the Broadway show). 3. A mayoral candidate is given the name Harold Gray, the creator of Little Orphan Annie comic strip. 4. Will Stacks is bald. 5. A band called "The Leaping Lizards" plays in a nightclub (it's the famous catchphrase of the comic strip Annie). 6. Annie rescues Sandy from a  bunch of bullies. 7. The song "N.Y.C" from the Broadway show, is played in the background of a scene. 8. The names of the actors in the fake film, MoonQuake Lake (Andrea Alvin & Simon Goodspeed) reference Annie history (original Annie, Andrea McArdle, The Alvin Theater, now the Neil Simon Theater, and The Goodspeed Theater in Connecticut where Annie premiered in 1976). 8. The red jacket, white leggings, and Mary Jane-style shoes Annie wears in the finale is a contemporary update of the classic Little Orphan Annie outfit.

Copyright © Ken Anderson