The three best Woody Allen films of the past decade or so, of the fourteen (!) he's directed since 2000, are by most measurements Match Point, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, and Blue Jasmine. Yes, Midnight in Paris was very popular and fun, but wasn't as serious of a film, nor, with its magical realism-driven plot, was it really intended to be.
What they all have in common is the fact that none of the lead characters in Match Point, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, or Blue Jasmine learn, grow, or change at the end of the film. This of course is contrary to what most writers and writing teachers would say about what makes "good drama"--characters are supposed to be challenged by the journey of the plot and change from the beginning to the end, otherwise there's "no story."
But the whole idea of being changed by anything is a bit hacky, and doesn't fit in with actual life. Who is more irritating than someone whose had a life-changing experience and consciously tries to act differently and live a different life? Change is one of the most impossible and overrated ideas out there--perhaps this is why we have demanded that it be a staple of all character-driven fiction, we have some perverse desire to believe in change and know that fiction is the only arena where it can be rendered somewhat convincingly. But people really don't change or learn things--one's internal monologue is more or less the same throughout one's life, and the way one reacts to things and engages with the environment stays fairly consistent. Experiences really mean little--what we bring to them far outweighs what they bring to us. Yet we tirelessly seek them out--why?
In Vicki Cristina Barcelona, this inertia of character is suggested, as Vicki and Cristina go on a whirlwind summer holiday in Barcelona that challenges their core ideas of who they are and what they want from life, but at the end of the film they are in exactly the same place they were before. The challenge is that they are both given an opportunity to get exactly what they think they want--Vicki gets a shot at escaping from her safe, predictable monogamous life with Doug, and Cristina gets a bohemian, creative, (pseudo)intellectual haven in which to test her (ultimately obtuse and facile) avant-garde ideas. Yet they ultimately choose to go back to who and what they were before Barcelona--even though they seem to have little idea of who and what that is, and even though they fled to Barcelona to escape their lives and "find themselves." So one's core self is necessarily held in low regard, yet it is ultimately what we retreat to because it is inescapable. We value experience more highly than anything, but it has negligible effects on us. This is the deep pessimism of Allen's recent serious work. At the end of the film, Vicki is safely marrying Doug and has her whole life more or less mapped out, and Cristina is confused and impulsive and lost amid her tedious notions of foggy avant-gardeism. They've learned nothing from their dramatic, romantic experiences.
Blue Jasmine spells this out more explicitly, as Jasmine/Jeannette begins the film by maniacally bearing her soul to a stranger on an airplane, who gets away from her as soon as possible, and ends it by seeking out a lone stranger minding her own business on a park bench and starts confiding in her like they were old friends. This is despite her best efforts to sincerely humble herself through menial labor, making herself vulnerable by getting deeply romantically involved with someone, taking a computer science course that was, for her at least, very challenging, and being kind to her simple, low-class sister who she's always regarded as beneath her. She couldn't have gone through a more dramatically different set of circumstances and couldn't have thrown herself into this attempt at starting over more deeply. And yet she is the exact same disaster of a person at the end of the film, because that's who she is. She learned nothing, she did not grow at all, and her experiences had no impact on her, other than giving her a new set of stories to spew at strangers she can somehow corner in public places.
What's exciting about this remarkably fruitful period in the almost 80 year old filmmaker's life is that his innate gifts for drawing believable characters have fused with an accurately pessimistic view of life, personhood, and character. We see fully formed, relatable characters in all of their inimitably Allen-esque luminescence, but they are consistently confronted with the inefficacy of their actions, the transience of experience, and the absurdity of life--which absurdity, it is becoming clear, is mainly that of deeply desiring change, yet being incapable of change.
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