One’s heart goes out to the air traveler (Joy Carlin) in “Blue Jasmine,” the journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) in “Philomena,” and Barbara Weston (Julia Roberts) in “August: Osage County” when they are forced to endure a garrulous companion holding forth.
The speakers are Jasmine Francis (Cate Blanchett), Philomena Lee (Judi Dench), and Karen (Juliette Lewis), the second born of the three Weston daughters, respectively. The experiences are tedious for the on-screen listeners but, thanks to the writing and acting in each sequence, illuminating for the audience. You can tell a lot about someone by the nonsense they speak.
Blanchett and Dench are shoo-ins for Best Actress Oscar nominations; the former’s position as the clear favorite could be challenged when “August: Osage County,” adapted by Tracy Letts from his Pulitzer-winning play, opens Christmas Day and Meryl Streep’s brutal, needy Weston matriarch hits the nation’s screens. Roberts, Margo Martindale (as the Streep character’s sister), Julianne Nicholson (as the youngest daughter, Ivy), and Lewis could all be in the frame for Best Supporting Actress.
Lewis won’t be hurt by her effusively delivered monologue, which, given the circumstances, is a classic of self-involvement and insensitivity. The Weston girls’ alcoholic father (Sam Shepard) has drowned himself and Karen has returned to her family home in rural Oklahoma, in the company of her feckless beau (Dermot Mulroney), for the funeral.
The old man has barely been laid to rest when the camera picks up Barbara driving back to the house with Karen, who’s unstoppably narrating her romantic history, which incorporates the abuse and cheating of a louse called Andrew and the comparative charms of Mulroney's Steve. Delivering Letts’s soliloquy, Lewis radiates the inextinguishable buoyancy of a woman who believes each new lover is “the one,” but who is so chronically self-deluding she is destined never to make the right choice. (She reminds me of the stripper played by Frances Fisher in Susan Streitfield’s underrated 1996 indie “Female Perversions.”)
Oblivious of Barbara’s glares and a barbed remark she makes about their father’s suicide, Karen is still babbling when she and Barbara are indoors. “I live for today,” she lies out loud to her sister and herself. “You take it as it comes — here and now.” As played by Lewis, she is ultimately an object of pity.
It’s harder to muster that emotion for Jasmine. Woody Allen’s opening shot shows the plane carrying the fallen Fifth Avenue socialite to down-market San Francisco. That Jasmine’s head is permanently in the clouds is indicated by the one-way conversation she’s having with fellow passenger Carlin, who’s too polite to say, “I’m a little tired, dear…”
A blinkered and unreconstructed victim of self-entitlement, marital dependence, and hubris, Jasmine regales the nodding and smiling old lady with her roseate early memories of being romanced and seduced by the now-dead conman (Alec Baldwin) she married. Like Karen, she is barely conscious that a cataclysmic suicide has occurred.
Jasmine’s monologue, like Karen’s, is quite short, but Allen has Blanchett continue it as he cuts from the plane to the escalator at the airport to the baggage carousel, where her companion finally escapes. The comic sequence is dramatically implausible, but it does establish Jasmine’s glassy distance from reality and her neurotic habit of perseverating on her past life in an ivory tower made of sand. Although Allen bridges Jasmine’s actual descent into San Francisco at the start, it becomes clear at the end of the film that it was the start of her final descent into madness.
A London airport is the setting for Philomena’s long speech. An ageing Irishwoman whose 3-year-old son was sold by nuns to an American couple in 1955, she is traveling with the Sixsmith to the US five decades later to try to locate him. Seated on the trolley that carries the humble old woman and the worldly reporter to the departure gate, she tells him the convoluted plot of the romantic novel she’s carrying. When I wrote about the scene before, I underestimated its tenderness.
Though bored out of his skull by Philomena’s rambling account of the book, Sixsmith feigns interest in it to help put her at ease. He knows she not only faces the ordeal of the flight but the likelihood that the momentous journey will be in vain, and that she is describing a silly story that comforts her to silence the fear and doubt inside her.
Trepidation peeking through her enthusiastic peroration, Dench conveys all this in her soft voice as the viewer’s eyes drift to Coogan, at his best here as a man taking care to monitor his reactions lest they needlessly hurt someone who’s been hurt too much. Of the three monologues, Philomena’s is the one that tells us most about its recipient.
