Crisis and disaster are meat and drink to the cinema and were in steady supply for years after the financial meltdown. But what do moviemakers do when the news is recovery – however slow – and that is no news at all, let alone drama? It is almost nostalgic to see Woody Allen, in his new, acclaimed Blue Jasmine, release a financial fraudster into his plot, played by Alec Baldwin, like the last swallow of summer, perhaps preparing to follow his fellows to warmer climes.
“Follow that meltdown.” This is what film audiences do, in their way. Blue Jasmine subtly includes a new meltdown with the old – personal breakdown. The heroine is driven to unstable, delusional behaviour by the husband’s crimes and disgrace. Look around and see the breakdown motif quietly stealing into movies, from Tom Hardy’s imploding hero who loses a career and family overnight in Stephen Knight’s forthcoming Locke – Knight created Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, the boom-and-bust TV quiz show, before becoming a screenwriter and director – to Robert Redford as a lone yachtsman literally all at sea in JC Chandor’s All Is Lost, premiered at Cannes, the filmmaker’s one-man-against-the-ocean follow-up to his Wall Street ensemble drama, Margin Call.
Redford was once the movie world’s Jay Gatsby, of course (in the 1974 film of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel). In 2013, Gatsby has returned to our screens, that career fraudster turned romantic hero. Is his comeback the sign of a mellower, more understanding approach to white-collar crime – or just a sign that we are moving on and there are bigger, more amplified dramas that can derive, closely or distantly, from business chicanery?