Jasmine has become accustomed to a certain kind of lifestyle and after the death of her husband she’s not quite ready to settle into more reasonable spending habits. In fact, she’s not quite ready to settle into reality in general.
And so begins the plot of Blue Jasmine, the new Woody Allen film starring the illustrious Cate Blanchett.
Jasmine (Blanchett) is a character who loves to tell stories and right from the get go we’re confronted (under the guise of a poor airline passenger) with a retelling of how she met her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin), a wealthy financier in New York. It’s the kind of sequence that would usually play off as bad exposition, but Jasmine herself isn’t a particularly reliable narrator and it doesn’t take too long to realize that this is just Allen going through the motions of layering his protagonist.
And of course, the omitted details in her version of the story quickly become evident. That wealthy husband she keeps talking about stole a bunch of money from his clients and died in jail. This trip she’s on is to her sister’s apartment in San Francisco because she has nowhere else to live. Of course, she still deems it necessary to fly there first class.
Blue Jasmine spends approximately equal amounts of time showing us Jasmine’s adjustment to her new life in California and flashing back to her old life as a wealthy socialite in New York. Allen loves to tell us exactly what happened in New York – either through Jasmine’s sister Ginger (played by Sally Hawkins) and her ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) or through Jasmine herself – before revealing the reality of how exactly it all went down.
This led to more than a few funny moments. Whether it’s listening to Jasmine give her version of an event and then watching the actual version of that event undercut pretty much everything she’s just said. Or just seeing Jasmine have to deal with the type of person she so obviously looks down on (placing her alongside virtually any of her sister’s acquaintances is a sure fire recipe for comedy). Needless to say, Allen’s trademark wit is never too far from sight.
But more than anything Blue Jasmine is a challenging character study of its very flawed protagonist. Jasmine is the kind of person who has a narrative of herself built up in her head, a type of New York intellectual too good for the menial tasks of others. And she’s often too willing to ignore reality to keep up with that narrative, tossing aside the little blemishes in her story until those blemishes become impossible to ignore.
She’s a brave choice for a main character. Allen does provide some moments where you can sympathize with Jasmine – mainly through her tragic relationships with men – but for the vast majority of the movies she’s abrasively unlikable and that’s sure to turn at least some people off the movie, even if it is often in very funny ways.
Still, Allen provides a nice counterpoint to Jasmine in her sister Ginger, whose story starts to parallel Jasmine’s as the film draws to a close. It’s Ginger that manages to muster the personal growth that Jasmine’s character simply cannot. My only complaint is that she was introduced with so little fanfare the significance of her arc can really sneak up on you.
Blue Jasmine has no shortage of great performances. Cate Blanchett steps in and absolutely takes over the movie. Of course, when was the last time Cate Blanchett hasn’t killed it? (I won’t blame her for Indiana Jones.) But the entire ensemble is quite good through and through. Sally Hawkins and Alec Baldwin are terrific as Jasmine’s sister and ex-husband, with actors like Louis C.K., Andrew Dice Clay, and Bobby Cannavale all getting their moments to shine.
Woody Allen has never been one to spoon feed his audience and Blue Jasmine is no exception. The movie is steeped in ambiguity and Allen never goes so far as to pass judgement on any of his characters, a fact that may be frustrating to some. It certainly doesn’t have the same passionate exuberance of Allen’s last big triumph Midnight in Paris (a movie I’ll admit I enjoyed quite a bit more). But Blue Jasmine is challenging and engrossing, and it sports an absolute strong house performance from Cate Blanchett to boot. You could do a lot worse.
Score: 4/5