A series of sea changes in class
position have made Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) blue. Or is her rattled state
symptomatic of something more fundamentally flawed in her psyche? Maybe it’s just
early dementia? We see her nattering away to a fellow passenger in first-class;
traumatized and narcissistic, she has a serious handicap when it comes to
over-sharing. But Jasmine needs to share—the bad thoughts creep up when she’s all
alone—and it seems anyone will do. She was not so long ago filthy rich. By the
rather devastating end of Blue Jasmine,
she’s mostly just filthy.
This
is the work of the serious Woody, which is a good Woody in that seriousness can
bring out a focus and discernment sometimes lacking in Allen’s recent comedies.
Woody on the economy might sound like a dubious tag, but Blue Jasmine is pretty smart, if cynical by default, about the
pitfalls of privilege and the ways that desires for class ascension corrupt everyone.
As the film begins, Jasmine arrives in San Francisco. She’s hopeless, penniless
and needs to crash at the modest home of her cashier sister Ginger (Sally
Hawkins). Jasmine is self-absorbed and snobby, and Ginger seems set up as her
salt-of-the-earth, pure-hearted foil, but Allen isn’t one to sentimentalize any
class, so as the plot thickens Ginger will also spy an opportunity to better
herself, however slightly, in the arms of a much classier man than her current
beau, Chili (Bobby Cannavale), and stoops to deception—both of Chili and
herself—to accelerate the new romance. The Ginger subplot may seem predictable,
but it also feels alive, thanks in part to the nuance and urgency brought to it
by Hawkins and Cannavale, and by Andrew Dice Clay giving a shockingly strong
performance, and Louis C.K., who’s wonderful, not emphatically funny but a welcome
breath of fresh air at the film’s musty midpoint. He’s one of those actors who
should be working with Allen as much as possible.
As
is Alec Baldwin, very funny in an incoherent role in To Rome With Love and very slimy here as Hal, Jasmine’s ex, a
Bernie Madoff-type whose imprisonment for running a Ponzi scheme leaves
Jasmine—who may or may not have been onto him—broke and humiliated. “I sign
everything,” Jasmine claims. “I’m very trusting.” Hal was a millionaire, a philanthropist
and serial philanderer—we see him chatting up a nipply confection at what seems
like an otherwise deadly boring party full of rich old people during one of Blue Jasmine’s many flashbacks. The line
separating past and present in this film is diaphanous. For Jasmine, as her confusion
burgeons, it occasionally dissolves altogether. At times the camera itself (Vicky Christina Barcelona’s Javier Aguirresarobe returns as Allen’s
cinematographer) seems to float, disembodied, in time with Jasmine’s spells of
dislocation. That these fugues finally work as well as they do are a testament
to Blanchett’s daringness, collaborative intuition and clarity of choices.
Amazingly, Allen claims to have not seen her in Liv Ullman’s 2009 production of
A Streetcar Named Desire at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music—amazing because Blanche Dubois is so obviously a
template for Jasmine, whose mind keeps escaping to some idealized past. She too
is always relying on the kindness of strangers, and is usually lying as a way
of soliciting that kindness—a recipe for small, personal tragedies of the sort
that Allen, however old-fashioned his sensibility may remain, is still very
good at evoking.
