Woody Allen has been making, essentially, a movie a year for a lot of years now. At this point you know who he is and you know how you feel about him, so to try to find any pathway into talking about his newest movie, Blue Jasmine, seems a little bit silly. Let’s just jump right in. Blue Jasmine sees Cate Blanchett playing a former New York rich bitch named Jasmine who’s hit rough times ever since her billionaire husband was outed as a fraudulent thief on the level of Bernie Madoff, she realized that he’d been screwing every young piece of tail she ever saw him interact with, and he subsequently hung himself in his jail cell after being outed. Jasmine is now broke, spurned by her former social circle, and so frazzled emotionally that she was picked up by the police wandering the streets while aimlessly muttering to herself. What’s a person in this situation to do? In Jasmine’s case, her only option is to go live with her adopted sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), and Ginger’s two sons in their common apartment located in San Francisco’s earthy Mission district. A social chaffing then commences.
The most important thing one needs to know going into Blue Jasmine is that it isn’t one of Allen’s broad comedies. There’s some humor here, some dark humor, but not enough that it could probably be called a dark comedy. Really, it’s largely just a character study where we get to know Jasmine and we spend some time living in her shoes—and Jasmine is not a pleasant person to get to know. She’s not only broken and neurotic from her ordeal, but even before she came into her troubles she was already a narcissist and a sociopath. Jasmine is an absolutely awful human being, but because Woody is so good at making us feel what it’s like to live life as she does, the movie ends up being an interesting thing to spend your time on anyway.
Already in the very first scene of the film, where Jasmine is getting off a flight from New York to San Francisco and verbal vomiting her entire life story to the unfortunate woman who had to sit next to her, the script establishes that she’s a character who has a complete lack of boundaries and who lacks a basic understanding of the feelings of the people around her. In her mind, she’s the center of the universe, the only one made of real flesh and blood, and everyone else is an inconsequential character who exists either to be a player in or an audience member watching the drama of her life.
The focus here is on understanding Jasmine as a character, to the point where even the shots that Allen frames are designed to put us in her mindset. When she first arrives at her sister’s apartment the empty space is revealed to us in a slow pan—which seems to be a waste of time, seeing as we’re just being shown a normal, unremarkable apartment—but then we realize that we’re supposed to be seeing the space from Jasmine’s perspective, and she thinks that it’s the lowest rent, most disgusting place that she’s ever laid eyes on. The scene is a great example of a filmmaking choice independent from what the actor is doing further developing a character, and it’s a great way to set the tone for what Allen has in store for us.
One storytelling strategy he uses that’s a bit more of a mixed bag is that he tells his tale in a non-linear fashion. Our focus continuously jumps back and forth between Jasmine’s efforts to build some sort of new life in the present and the period right before her fall, when she was living fat on the hog and ignoring the warning signs that were popping up all around her. On the negative side, telling the story this way constantly rips you out of moments you were becoming engaged in (mostly what’s going on in the present) and then plops you in an entirely different situation that’s quite a bit less interesting (most of the stuff in the past). The good news is that Allen actually uses the strategy for something, instead of just throwing it out there in an effort to mix things up like it seems most screenwriters do. When we jump from the present to the past the two scenes are always connected in some way thematically, or one further illuminates something that was happening in the other. Would the film have been better off completely focusing on the events happening in the present? That’s impossible to say. And at least everything being attempted here is being attempted with some sort of plan in mind.
Of course, with the focus of the film being so intently put on the Jasmine character, all of the veteran filmmaking tricks in the world wouldn’t have been enough to keep this story interesting if the lead performance wasn’t up to snuff. Luckily, Allen has cast Blanchett here, so we’re in good hands. Blanchett is a raw nerve in this role. If there’s any tension to the film, any driving force pushing things forward and keeping you interested in what’s going to happen, it’s the constant rage that’s boiling just underneath the surface of her face. It keeps you wondering when exactly she’s going to lose control completely and what the consequences of that break from reality are going to be. She’s always able to keep your sympathies too. Jasmine is such an awful person, but Blanchett imbues her with so much pain and loss that you can’t help but feel invested in what’s going to happen to her.
Blanchett may be putting on a clinic, but the supporting performances are a little bit of a mixed bag. On the good side of the spectrum, Sally Hawkins is really authentic and fun to watch as the blue collar sister, and Andrew Dice Clay of all people is also really authentic and resonant as her ex-husband. He doesn’t get the most screen time, but he makes you feel for his character’s plight here so much more than he made you feel for Ford Fairlane’s plight after his pet koala bear gets killed in that film. Who knew he had it in him? Somewhere in the middle you have Alec Baldwin, who isn’t doing much more than exploiting his Alec Baldwin persona, and Louis CK, who’s got such a small part that he isn’t able to do much with it either way. On the negative end of the spectrum you have the performances from people like Bobby Cannavale and Alden Ehrenreich, who both go so big that they come off as being too cartoonish. Their performances don’t fit well next to Blanchett’s, even if Cannavale is able to get a few laughs after his character becomes pathetic.
Really, Blanchett’s performance is worth the price of admission alone though, no matter how you feel about what everyone else is doing. The only reason one should really stay away from Blue Jasmine is if they get too uncomfortable watching awkward interactions and spending time with characters who can’t pick up on social cues. It starts to feel like every other scene here consists of an aggressively amorous person putting the moves on someone who isn’t interested. Whichever side of that coin that resonates with you, being the clueless person with no chance or the pursued person who doesn’t know how to make the other go away, that’s rough to be around. Some of the more twisted among us love challenging humor like this, but for others it’s a real turn off.
There’s also quite a bit of booze swilling in this movie that never gets addressed. It wouldn’t be so much of a problem if there weren’t a scene where Jasmine has her sister’s young kids out in a restaurant while completely sloshed. If felt out of character for Hawkins’ character to put her kids in the care of her erratic, alcoholic sister, and it felt like the sort of scene that was eventually going to have grave consequences, but then nothing ultimately comes of it. The scene seemed to be evidence of a screenplay that needed a little bit more focus or a little bit of trimming. Maybe if Allen didn’t churn these things out so fast he could knock it out of the park every time, you know? Ultimately though, even though Blue Jasmine is a film that has a handful of problems, there’s still enough good stuff here, and what Blanchett is doing is so interesting that it’s still a solid recommendation. It’s just on the lower end of films that could be described as solid recommendations.
