How much sympathy can one of us regular folks have for the stresses that befall a high-society woman who abandoned the completion of a college degree upon discovering that she could instead marry a dashing business investor with mysteriously incalculable wealth? How bad can we feel for her when she's placed in a situation where her skill at spending her husband's money on Paris runway fashion or lavish cocktail parties serves her no benefit? What if she finds out that her whole life was built on lie after lie - that her wealth is pure fiction and her marriage as well?
This is the challenge facing viewers of Woody Allen's "Blue Jasmine," a mostly dramatic film from arguably the living master of cinematic comedy. It's no secret that Allen is my favorite director, and I've been known to say that "a bad Woody Allen film is usually better than a good film by somebody else." And while I was as impressed as I expected I'd be by the lead performance of sure-to-be-Oscar-frontrunner Cate Blanchett in the film's title role, I found myself wrestling with a tough thing. While blown away by Blanchett's profound mastery of her craft in her every printed frame as Jasmine French, I could not bring myself around to feeling sorry for what was happening to her at all. And I have this thing about needing to empathize with, if not like, the main character of a story.
But then, it happened. And I should have trusted Woody. Because in one breathtaking and intense scene, my feelings for her changed, and I carried a newly-revealed sympathy for her through to the end of the film. Once this switch flipped for me, I noticed numerous other places where an unsympathetic audience member could finally come aboard in support of this character. And therein lies just one of the many acts of genius on display in "Blue Jasmine," a film that plays on screen like an expertly crafted short story, a firmly structured work of classic literature based on a contemporary theme delivered by a master craftsman at the top of his game.
"Blue Jasmine" is a wonder of a movie, lean and deliberate, and as intellectually affecting to me as it might be emotionally affecting to the person sitting next to me. And it joins Allen's 2005 film "Match Point" (coincidentally, also a drama) and 2011's Best Picture-nominated "Midnight in Paris" (a late career return to form in the romantic comedy mold Allen has done so well for decades) as his third masterpiece of this century.
Alternating between the New York of her past and San Francisco of her present, "Blue Jasmine" tells the story of a woman (Blanchett) who has already come unraveled in the wake of the undoing of her husband Hal, played flawlessly and with a soulless smile by Alec Baldwin. Allen rarely specifically references contemporary world events, which is probably what gives so many of his movies a timeless quality, and this can also be his downfall when he perpetuates his own style at the expense of expanding his palate, as he is sometimes wont to do. But here, there is little question that Baldwin's Hal is a fictionalized Bernie Madoff, and Blanchett's Jasmine could easily appear on a Real Housewives reality television program, though with Allen's pedigree, the closer reference point and obvious inspiration for Jasmine is Blanche DuBois, from Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." For fans of "Streetcar," in fact, the "Blue Jasmine" screenplay includes multiple intersection points, from the presence of not one but two Stanley-esque characters to references as finely detailed as line lifts, certainly candy for any audience member with the background to grab the homages.
Left with little more than her Louis Vuitton luggage and designer wardrobe, Jasmine (whose real name is Jeanette but she's changed it herself - one early attempt of many she makes to recreate herself) finds herself on the doorstep of her sister Ginger's apartment in San Francisco. She has no one else to turn to after her husband is imprisoned for his illegal investment and banking deals and her son walks out on both of them in search of a normalcy he can't quite visualize. Her life as she knew it was gone, and she goes on and on about how the government left her with nothing.
Perhaps somewhat predictably, Ginger (Sally Hawkins) is everything Jasmine is not, though Allen is smart enough to recognize this time-worn device and writes a character twist into the script that justifies it completely. Not surprisingly, Jasmine struggles to cope with her new surroundings. Ginger lives in a modest flat furnished bohemian-style with mismatched tchotchkes, and her two young sons always seem to be dismantling it when they're not with their father, Ginger's ex-husband Augie (in the film's most shocking performance because he's played - brilliantly - by the long-faded comedian Andrew Dice Clay). Jasmine never liked Augie. She turns her nose on Ginger's living as a grocery store clerk. She lacks connection with her nephews. And she's even more unnerved by the arrival on the scene of Ginger's new man, Chili (Bobby Cannavale).
The largest wedge between the sisters has to do with Jasmine's having encouraged Ginger and her then-husband Augie to trust Hal to invest lottery winnings for them instead of allowing Augie to open his own business. Of course, Ginger and Augie lost everything, too. Though Jasmine is quick to outwardly deflect blame and shrug off her involvement in the dismantling of her sister's one opportunity for a better life, we know from the beginning that the guilt is not only real, but cripplingly burdensome. We know this because Jasmine is frequently seen talking to walls, recreating conversations to herself, and popping prescription anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medication like M&Ms, always washing them down with Stoli. In this way, "Blue Jasmine" also calls to mind the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical "Next To Normal," as both works take an in-depth look at the impact of profound loss and the far from exact science of the pharmaceutical treatment of a grief-induced nervous breakdown.
Jasmine's mental instability is, of course, what provides Blanchett with the material to create one of the most unbelievable acting performances I've seen in a few years. Her work almost defies criticism and surely rests in a class with Daniel Day Lewis' work as President Lincoln. I don't see how she can't possibly be the front runner for the Best Actress Oscar, and it's not just because the work is showy. It's because Blanchett so completely immerses herself in Jasmine's tumult, vapidity and cloudiness that the honesty of her work rings louder still in Jasmine's more quiet moments. Her performance is brilliant. There's no other way to say it. And if there's any justice, Allen will find that he's coached his first lead actress to an Oscar since Diane Keaton in "Annie Hall," almost 40 years ago.
The film's flashback structure was, for me, part of its great success, as it was advantageous for the audience to reach back to find clarity and context for things happening to Jasmine in the present, rather than watch a straight-linear deterioration. Symbolically, the juxtapositions emphasized the way Jasmine's high society life became her albatross, as she married Hal prior to completing a college degree and never learned skills aside from shopping, decorating, fundraising and entertaining, none of which can provide her with a living now. By structuring the film so that moments in Jasmine's present call to mind moments from her extravagant past, Allen and his production team give viewers some palpable contrasts, their proximity solidifying one's understanding of just how far she's fallen.
Allen's writing here ranks with his very best screenplays, and his direction is not only confident, but in places, surprisingly fresh. I quickly noticed that he did not treat the two cities in which "Blue Jasmine" was filmed as characters in the story in the way that he has in his recent European-set travelogue films. Instead, they are backgrounds that provide depth and insight to the main character's struggles, and Allen wisely cedes focus to Blanchett in what is likely the greatest star vehicle of her career, if not the most prominent star-led film Allen's ever made, given his proclivity toward ensemble pieces. Comedy is also far more circumstantial here than it is the product of a typical line of Allen-penned wit, though a few of those surface, too. And there's far less comedy to be had, barring that of schadenfreude.
There's little I can find wrong with this movie. I read a review from Brad Brevet, my favorite online film critic, in which he stated that "Blue Jasmine" suffered because some of its subplots seemed superfluous. And while I frequently agree with Brevet and respect him for his thorough and thought-provoking analyses, I couldn't be more in disagreement with him on this one. One of the subplots in question involves an altercation Jasmine has with a dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) with whom she accepts her first menial employment, and without saying too much, this subplot contains the very scene that allowed me to finally sympathize with Jasmine.
Another involves Ginger's flirtations with a character played by the comedian Louis C.K., a sequence of events which challenges Ginger's relationship with Chili. Brevet said that the effect this subplot had on the film was "little to nothing." For me, it reinforced the deepest emotional connections I had with the film as a whole with regards to the nature of from where true happiness derives. Without it, this movie could have been reduced to little more than an acting showcase for Blanchett. With these scenes, "Blue Jasmine" is so much more than a movie about a rich bitch having a crack-up because she can't cope with how the 99 percent live after her well runs dry. That is, to some extent, how I felt after watching the otherwise engrossing documentary "The Queen of Versailles" last year - another "Green Acres"-like story of the falling rich dealing with our average lives and where their remaining jewels fit into it. But I walked out of this movie thinking about so much more, and even analyzing my own relationships.
I think that without these subplots, "Blue Jasmine" would play out as a film with one tone. Instead, the stories add color in addition to support. Just as Jasmine's unpredictable downward spiral appears to be nearing its seemingly inevitable conclusion, she meets a man (Peter Sarsgaard) who will infuriate viewers not because he's inherently unlikable or bad, but because Jasmine gravitates toward him as the only man she's met in San Francisco with the credentials to restore her to the Park Avenue-styled life to which she's accustomed before she's forced to spend too much of her time forging any iron for her spine from the fire of hardship. Jasmine's involvement with her new suitor reveals yet another layer of simply structured complexity to Allen's script, which at this point begins to question the very nature of what is real. Which relationships are real? Is wealth real? Can we recreate ourselves out of the ashes, and if we do, is that new creation "real" or just some manufactured story we tell ourselves to escape our smoldering pasts?
To what extent is Jasmine implicit in her undoing? "Blue Jasmine" certainly clarifies Hal's guilt - repeatedly - but Allen leaves the viewer to ponder Jasmine's. She is most certainly guilty of rampant entitlement, to be sure. And she's maddeningly delusional, not just in the sense of her medically real mental illness but her her maddeningly surface-level plans for getting back on her feet again. Jasmine is broken and condescending. But she was once alive and vibrant, even if only in that plastic, affluent sort of way.
Perhaps the greatest triumph of all is that Allen allows us to pass judgment on Jasmine as we see fit from where we stand in all of these recent financial crises and catastrophes of selfish consumer culture. And then, just to complicate things, he forces us to stare in the face of a once-regal woman laid terribly low, now sitting on a park bench with a few remaining pieces of her once regal clothing, her hair disheveled and her makeup gone completely. And we are able to hit pause on our grass-is-greener longings and see our modest lives as a gift, heading out of the theater to our reasonably-priced compact sedans, the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Mo Money, Mo Problems" echoing its truth in our brains with the same resonance that the song "Blue Moon" worked as facade in Jasmine's life.
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