Why are there more working-class white characters in Woody Allen’s new movie than in the entire 415 area code?

And why do they all sound like they’re from Queens?


Like many San Franciscans, I was titillated last year when Woody Allen announced he would be returning—after an absence of more than 40 years—to shoot a new film in my hometown, his first local shoot since “Play it Again, Sam” in 1972. We had been feeling ignored.

But with “Blue Jasmine,” the prodigal Jewish son redeemed himself among local cinephiles. The weeks he was shooting last summer in the Bay Area ushered in a daily game of “Where’s Woody?” with rumored sightings of the famously reclusive director recorded in the local papers, along with online speculation about the nature of each scene (“a fancy party in Belvedere!” “a marital squabble in the Mission District!”); guesses on each actor’s role (“Bobby Canavale plays a car mechanic!”); and breathless reports from friends who scored precious slots as background players (a.k.a. “extras,” for those new to the glamour of the cinema).

So I attended the film eagerly to see how our city fares, encouraged by early word about Cate Blanchett’s performance. The latter is a complete knockout. As many of you will know by now, she plays a cross between Ruth Madoff and Blanche DuBois, creating a Xanax-popping, Chanel-jacketed, semi-delusional socialite, tightrope-walking on the edge of nervous collapse. Blanchett is amazing, and her character, Jasmine French, is as sharply observed a female role to emerge from Woody’s keyboard as any in “Hannah…” “Vicky…” or “Annie Hall.”

And there’s the rub. The full-blooded believability of Jasmine and her privileged world—including all the scenes in Manhattan and the Hamptons—is what makes it so frustrating to observe the cardboard inauthencity of most of the important “San Francisco” characters that Woody has peppered throughout the film. Who are these people? Bobby Canavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Louis C.K…. never has San Francisco looked and sounded more like Queens. It’s as if Woody—and his usually impeccable casting director Juliet Taylor—plucked garden variety working-class characters from his stock repertoire and pasted them into a Bay Area setting without any sense of their actually belonging there, or giving them any backstory that made sense out of their living in the Mission (Canavale), the Outer Sunset (Clay), or Marin County (C.K.). As Jasmine’s struggling working-class sister,  “slumming it” at 14th and South Van Ness, Sally Hawkins fares a bit better, perhaps because she has the skills to transform her native English accent into something you’d actually hear in the Mission (note to Woody, though: that neighborhood has for years been a hotbed of rising rents, hipsters and Googleistas).

But more jarring than the accents, the San Francisco these characters inhabit includes virtually no Asians, no Latinos, and no gay people—at least none with any lines. It’s all white working class (a minority population in the 415 if there ever was one), and not an especially Bay Area version of that sub-group to boot. In one scene, Canavale’s buddies hang out watching boxing and eating pizza; how hard would it have been to get them to lose their Joisy accents and scarf some burritos during a 49er game…or better yet, a Raiders game?

So while I was delighted to see some odd corners of my city show up in a new Woody Allen movie, I left feeling that we hadn’t really been understood very well. It was a tourist’s-eye view of our town, written by someone using a slightly out-of-date guidebook and a very out-of-touch social map. Maybe the absence of 40 years took its toll on Woody the writer. I am not certain he could conjure up an authentic sense of a city he hadn’t really seen since Nixon was in office. Even “Play It Again, Sam” wasn’t exactly a documentary, but he got away with a nostalgic view of the city since his main character was (literally) haunted by a noir-era Bogart.

Traditionalists are often aghast when contemporary artists attempt to intervene into and transform iconic places—even temporarily. As a teenager, I remember the outcry in the Bay Area when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed to erect their “Running Fence”—a 25-mile long shimmering strand of veils that rippled across the Sonoma hills to the sea, and stood for only two weeks. People scoffed at the wasteful effort, ridiculing the artists’ attempt to comment on, let alone improve, what nature had, in its glory, already made perfect. And yet whenever I meander through the grassy coastal hills near Bodega Bay, the image of that fence remains vivid. The transformation of the landscape seems to have had a potent afterlife in my unconscious: I round a corner, wondering if I might still glimpse it; lines of white sheep scattered across the hills bring to mind the desultory rambling of that fence; and actual wooden fences seem stolid and heavy in comparison to the linen veil that lasted only a fortnight. The work permanently shifted how I see the landscape. And that of course was the point—a shift in perception.

And yet Turrell has created something magnificent inside Wright’s space that obliterates the memory of it even while paying homage to it. Walking into the rotunda, one enters not a rounded architectural volume, but an enormous light chamber. Looking up, one sees not the spherical solidity of a building atrium, but a numinous void…a series of concentric ellipses, slowly shifting in hue, now gray, now rose, now indigo, but always receding in intensity toward a glowing white center. There is no sound track (other than the constant, and sometimes annoying, burble of visitors); and since the second week of the installation, padded mats have been tossed onto the floor to accommodate the inevitable impulse to gaze, supine, into the void.

As I stared, transfixed, into the light-space, I found myself disoriented—was this really the Guggenheim rotunda, now misshapen into an oval? Was I actually staring up into five stories of space, or was this somehow a flat surface, a screen with projected colors that told some kind of abstract narrative? And I realized that this disorientation was precisely the idea of Turrell’s work—it made you take a step away, even if unconsciously, from the known, rationally perceived world into a more ambiguous, unsettling, mysterious place.

Some have carped about the installation—offended by the excess of a gold-plated institution throwing a lot of money at a brand-name artist. Others find the whole idea an exercise in gilding the lily. The Guggenheim rotunda is already a masterwork of light and volume, so why make it another such space? But as I keep turning my thoughts back to that glowing elliptical teleidoscope, I realize that, as with the Sonoma hills, I will likely never be able to experience the Guggenheim in the same way again…the memory of those ellipses will always be vibrating at the fringes of my perception. And that alone makes this artwork a phenomenal achievement.

(Do you have a favorite—or failed—example of an artistic transformation?  I. M. Pei’s Louvre pyramid? Something by Andy Goldsworthy? Feel free to add your own memory, comment or experience below!)   

Jhumpa Lahiri has made a well-deserved name for herself (and snagged a Pulitzer Prize) with her two collections of short stories, which are among the more sublime prose offerings of the last 20 years. Her most recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth, featured a set of interlocking stories in the second half that inched ever closer to being a novella rather than an independent trio of stories. So I am thrilled, but not surprised, that her forthcoming publication, The Lowland, is a full-fledged novel, her first since The Namesake, which many will remember from its film version. As with her previous work, The Lowland examines the lives and yearnings of families divided between India and the U.S.; her storytelling is at once intimate and powerful. The new novel has already been included in the long list for this year’s Booker Prize in the U.K. [Update Sept. 10: it's now one of six shortlist finalists!]

A funny, haunting, and at times mysterious vaudeville is on view at Berkeley Rep for the next few weeks, performed with remarkable subtlety by Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Harold Pinter’s 1974 play No Man’s Land is a strange, rueful but always entertaining match of wills between two aging writers—the mischievous and needy poet Spooner (McKellen) and the patrician but vulnerable Hirst (Stewart)—who have recently met in a pub but who perhaps know each other already. Their encounter over the course of a night and a day’s conversations is a masterfully choreographed do-si-do of wit and despair.   

I was not previously familiar with this Pinter play, but the current production, directed by Sean Mathias, completely disarmed me. Though set entirely in a drawing room, watching it is like entering a farcical dream-space that is tinged with something dreadful just beyond the shadows. Nothing really happens, but everything seems at stake.

The two Sirs—titans of the screen though they may be—are enormously enjoyable to watch and listen to in vivo (ably seconded by Billy Crudup and Shuler Hensley as Hirst's man-servants/ bodyguards), since the play’s dialogue is delicious and musical, and their plummy, Shakespeare-trained voices and exquisitely nuanced physical choices can be savored in the intimacy of the Roda Theatre. (In the preview performance I attended, even McKellen's occasional first-act slip-ups--calling for prompts with a subtly inserted "Yes" rather than the usually disruptive "Line?"--served to remind me of the high-wire thrill of watching artists performing in the moment.) The production is here for just a few weeks, en route to Broadway where the cast will perform it in repertory with Waiting for Godot.

I came home and immediately found that the original National Theatre (London) production with the legendary John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube. Watching it didn’t diminish my appreciation for the current production at all, and in fact made me marvel at how fresh and mysterious the play continues to be nearly 40 years later. Catch it if you can.