Blue Jasmine

Woody Allen’s”Blue Jasmine” seems a comedy derailed by tragedy. The film isn’t funny although the premise is broadly humorous: the spoiled wife of a Wall Street predator, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) has lost everything. Her husband, played by Alec Baldwin, is a Bernie Madoff-style thief so crooked that he has even stolen the nest-egg of Jasmine’s sister, Ginger, a blue-collar woman who lives in San Francisco. Baldwin has been prosecuted and imprisoned and Blanchett’s character finds herself destitute. She flies from Manhattan to San Francisco where she rooms with her embittered sister -- both women were adopted and they are very different in appearance and sensibility. Jasmine is fragile -- she has suffered a breakdown that required treatment with what she calls “Edison’s Medicine,” that is electro-shock therapy -- and she is drinking heavily and desperately. Her past privileged life, secured by her husband’s larceny, erupts into her impoverished present life in the form of sudden flashbacks. And, from time to time, Jasmine comes unstuck in time and indulges in tirades directed at invisible antagonists. She is one of those pinched, hysterical women, fashionably dressed and articulate, but somehow deranged, that you might encounter at a party maundering on and on about the injustice of her divorce -- the people around her are never certain whether her sudden vituperative outbursts are directed at them, or people that she merely imagines to be present. Initially, Allen designs the film as a fish-out-of-water city-mouse/country mouse kind of satire. In a flashback, we see Blanchett’s working class sister and her husband, played sympathetically and effectively, by Andrew Dice Clay, visiting New York and the Hamptons. Jasmine and her con-man husband are appalled by the couple and embarrassed by them -- except for investing (and losing) their money, the Manhattan socialites want nothing to do with them. The situation is reversed when the imperious and demanding Jasmine moves into her sister, Ginger’s, humble apartment and has to seek work. Now, Blanchett’s character is the one ill-equipped to deal with her milieu. Allen apparently conceived the film as a comedy exploiting differences between the Mitt Romney-like super-rich and the rest of us and, further, probably planned to get laughs out of the distinction between east and west coast lifestyles and folkways. But the film is hijacked by Blanchett’s spectacularly poignant and powerful performance. Jasmine is like Blanche Dubois in “A Streetcar named Desire” -- a detestable figure with whome we ultimately sympathize and the film is pitiless in observing her gradual deterioration into madness. Allen engineers a roundelay of romantic encounters and ephemeral love affairs -- Ginger strays from her ineffectual but handsome fiancée to enjoy a brief, doomed fling with a married man (Louis C. K.) and Jasmine is courted by a sophisticated and attractive diplomat, and, also, almost raped by her employer, a pathetically amorous dentist. Allen’s real interest seems to lie in presenting these flawed love affairs and he tracks the trajectory of several of these romances from first encounter through flirtation and sex and, then, into disillusion. The film is made in a classical style -- the camera work and editing are transparent and the sort of scenic (and distracting) beauty that Allen invested in his recent films about Paris and Rome does not exist in “Blue Jasmine”; the San Francisco and New York locations are realistically portrayed but the travelogue locations that made “Midnight in Paris”, for instance, so audience-pleasing are suppressed in this film (Allen doesn’t want to compete with Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, I think, with respect to San Francisco scene-setting.) The film is brilliantly acted; all parts down to the very smallest roles (for instance, a store clerk who kindly remonstrates with Ginger’s disconsolate lover during a confrontation in a grocery produce section) are exceptionally detailed and warmly presented. Allen shows some of Renoir’s generosity and inquisitiveness about human nature in his direction of this picture and the film is very interesting, gripping, and, in some scenes, intensely emotional -- Allen taps a bit of Ingmar Bergman’s ferocity in depicting the vicious quarrels between siblings and lovers. The movie is a little shaky about social class on the West Coast -- Jasmine makes disparaging remarks about Ginger’s apartment, but the place is spacious and probably worth about 2 million dollars in the go-go real estate market in San Francisco. It’s hard to imagine exactly how a check-out girl at a local grocery could afford to live in a beautifully decorated place of this kind in tony San Francisco -- in the real world, Ginger would be living in some cheerless and broiling suburb and taking the train into Frisco to work. And Allen’s working class characters sometimes seem a bit like figures out of a parable -- there is a timeless quality about the blue collar working men in the film and they seem to be figures imagined from Allen’s youth, 1950’s carpenters and tradesmen. But these defects don’t really harm the film -- it is a kind of fable. and a demonstration of a rough sort of retributive justice, lovely enough in its way and well worth seeing.