By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on Movies: Blue Jasmine
BLUE JASMINE (Three and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Woody Allen, 2013
“Blue Moon, You saw me standing alone,
“Without a dream in my heart,
“Without a love of my own.”
“Blue Moon, you knew just what I was there for…”
Richard Rodgers (music) and Lorenz Hart (words).
Blue Jasmine may not really be one of Woody Allen’s best films, as many are calling it. But it definitely contains one of the great actress performances in any of his movies: Cate Blanchett’s absurd, heart-breaking portrayal of Jasmine French. Allen and Blanchett’s Jasmine is a razor-sharp look at a woman of style who seems solidly to belong to the American rich — but then loses everything. It’s one of the most memorable jobs ever by an Allen actress, on a level with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and Manhattan, Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo and Broadway Danny Rose, Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway, Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives and Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Blanchett’s hungry eyes, and exaggerated elegance stick in your mind, gain depth and feeling as you watch her. The performance has been nearly universally praised, and it deserves to be.
Perhaps that’s because the performance is a kind of culmination of Allen’s attitudes toward the moneyed white culture Jasmine represents. Jasmine lives what seems a charmed life as a member of the Manhattan financial social elite whose vagaries Allen loves to have fun with — but then finds herself hurled into the chaos of the 2008 financial collapse, and turning into Woody’s version of Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams’ lady on the edge, wandering, desperate, talking to herself, at the end of the line.
Is this a comedy or a drama? Actually it’s both. Much of the film is clearly intended (and works) as high dramatics, but the movie also draws from rich comedy wellsprings: swindles, self-deception and humbuggery. But here, these illusions destroy more than dignity, drive Allen’s characters into the stormy waters of Bergmanesque emotional trauma in which he likes sometimes to swim (in Interiors, Another Woman, or Match Point). Jasmine, whom Blanchett plays with a radiant selfishness and fragility, loses it (money, position, comfort) all, or most of it. She discovers that her life is a lie, and that her smoothie financier husband Hal (Alec Baldwin, at his most slickly manipulative) is a liar, cheat and thief (both financial and romantic). She finds that her world was whirling on a Bernie Madoff-style pyramid of lies, and that she has few resources to cope with her present plunge to the Middle Depths.
When we first see Jasmine, she’s on a plane headed for San Francisco and a temporary refuge with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins, the breezy free spirit of Mike Leigh’s 2008 Happy-Go-Lucky), jabbering away about her life to her captive seatmate (Joy Carlin), who tells her husband later that Jasmine started off the conversation by talking to herself — which she does more and more these days.
Soon, Jasmine has reached the Mission District where Ginger lives with her auto repair guy boyfriend, Chili (Bobby Cannavale) — which is where we get the first of many deliberate parallels to Williams’ great, sad, lyrical play A Streetcar Named Desire. Jasmine has arrived like Blanche DuBois at the New Orleans apartment of her sister Stella and of Blanche’s macho nemesis, Stella’s brutal hubby Stanley Kowalski — at a place which is her last stop, with a household where she’s partly welcome and partly resented and desired, and where her only hope of escape is Stanley‘s mama‘s boy bowling buddy Mitch..
Ginger is the Stella character, and Chili is Stanley — and so is Ginger’s ex-husband Augie (played surprisingly well by hoodlum-comedian Andrew Dice Clay) — and there are couple of possible Mitches, the most plausible of which is Peter Sarsgaard as Dwight, a State Department guy who sees Jasmine — or at least Jasmine in her dream world — as a fit wife for a man with political ambitions. Another more obnoxious maybe-Mitch is D. Fischler the horny dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg of The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man)., who employs her as a very nervous receptionist.
Jasmine is humiliated by Fischler’s attentions — and humiliated also by Ginger’s lower-class apartment and the crudity of Chili and his sports fan buddies. Her life, since the fall of Hal, is a string of humiliations, She does have her own Belle Reve memories though — and half the movie is taken up with flashbacks to Jasmine’s One Percenter life with Hal, and with the destruction of that dream, as she finally discovers everything he was — and everything his world was. At the end, Allen gives Blanchett the actress, a shattering moment — fittingly for an actress whose own stage performance of Blanche (under Liv Ullmann’s direction) was said to be phenomenal.
Why does Allen turn his story into grim parody of one of America‘s greatest saddest plays? Well, in fact parody, and putting himself into different artistic worlds, is the soul of much of his comedy; In a way, he can be as much a parodist as Mel Brooks — but where Brooks sends up Frankenstein and Star Wars, Allen has classier targets: Bergman, Fellini, film noir. Like Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris, he likes to flee into other worlds, other times. Once he put himself into Bogart’s world, now he enters Tennessee Williams’. With less jokes this time.
Woody twists some of the scenes: Augie and Chili are not such bad guys; Jasmine is less sympathetic than Blanche, and her strangers less kind. The real villain in Blue Jasmine is the economy itself, and its agents like Hal.
Blanchett is an amazing actress . Like Katharine Hepburn (whom she impersonated in The Aviator) or Meryl Streep (with whom she shares a sisterly resemblance), she is a player of tremendous vitality and depth, And brain power. Here, she often seems to be flirting with pathos, but she always slips the clinch — and to dance away many times from the edge of humor, too. It’s a very intellectual performance, and the ending loops back to recall the beginning. Everything Blanchett does is transparent; like Jasmine — and like Blanche, we can see right though her. The rest of the actors, taking on literate, challenging Allen-scripted parts for scale (and obviously having a ball doing it) are wonderful. So is the mellow cinematography of Javier Aguirresrobe and the posh or more ordinary settings by Santo Loquasto. The music is more of the period jazz, blues and pop he loves to play or us, and that we should love to hear. I know I do.
Allen is 77. This is his 44th movie. Whatever else you can say, or complain about him, his work ethic is tremendous. Yet some critics (admittedly a minority) still tend to handle him like a pariah or like an unhip old codger who needs instruction in the niceties of art — to treat him and his work with what seems contempt. Well, for his sins, he should suffer, I guess. (That’s what the blues is about.) But punishment should have an end. Anyway, in a climate as conducive to bad movies as our own right now, his productivity and intelligence begins to seem a kind of artistic heroism. We should applaud him sometimes, rather than cast the same old stones .
To tell the truth, I would have liked Blue Jasmine better if it were funnier — and it could have been, and kept the big dramatic moments too. A Streetcar Named Desire has plenty of jokes, and so do Chekhov and Shakespeare. Chekhov after all, regarded himself as a comedic playwright — and he wasn’t just referring to the early plays, the funny ones. Uncle Vanya can make us laugh too.
