Between Worlds
“Blue Jasmine,” Woody Allen’s 48th feature and his best since 2005’s “Match Point,” begins on an airplane. Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is en route from New York to San Francisco, from her past life of Park Avenue and Hamptons privilege to an uncertain future with her estranged working-class sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins).
She breathlessly spills details of her life to her traveling companion, all the way through the baggage claim. The punch line, of course, is that her companion is a stranger, an unlucky seatmate, and Jasmine is already a bit unhinged.
Jasmine—whose billionaire husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), hung himself in prison after being tossed away for various white-collar crimes (read: Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, et al.)—has nowhere safe to land. And neither, in a way, does Woody Allen.
Long gone are his love and his eye for the Big Apple. So too, his San Francisco has very little real feel; it is a vision from his imagination, with cardboard cutout characters, albeit some funny ones. There are desultory shots of the bay and Alcatraz, as well as a fancy beachside deck in the Hamptons and a few Upper East Side boutiques, but the action of “Blue Jasmine” is all interior.
Forced to live with Ginger, whose tattooed, dopey, but good-hearted boyfriend, Chili (Bobby Cannavale), she considers white trash, Jasmine attempts to resurrect her life. She takes a job as an assistant to an uncomfortably amorous dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) and enrolls in a computer course at night so she can take an online course in interior design (a minor joke there).
Then Jasmine meets a suave, wealthy State Department employee, Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard). At this point, through an implausible set of circumstances—one of which involves having defrauded Ginger and her ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay) out of their lottery winnings—Jasmine’s past catches up with her.
One cannot help but wonder: Is Allen doing cinematic penance for his sins? With each succeeding movie, the theme of marital infidelity with a much younger woman gets stronger. In “Blue Jasmine,” Hal’s serial adultery, culminating in an off-camera tryst with a teenage au pair, becomes an important plot point.
The film also has Allen’s characteristic satiric bite, if not outright hostility toward the phoniness of an upper-crust urban lifestyle. But isn’t that very Park Avenue milieu his own? And Allen seems to be increasingly deluding himself with his romanticized notions, whether of working-class heroism and purity or the European bohemianism of past films. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Woody’s analyst’s office!
Whatever his sins, Allen always cuts to the bone. The domestic drama and dialogue have undeniable power and a feeling of psychological honesty. In an early scene that is both funny and poignant, Chili and a sidekick, like naïve children, pepper Jasmine with questions about her past and her plans, as she struggles to keep her composure.
What elevates “Blue Jasmine” far above the ordinary is Blanchett’s mesmerizing performance, a shoo-in for Best Actress. It has elements of great stage theatricality as much as movie magnetism. Blanchett may be our finest living actor. The cast around her is uniformly excellent, especially Hawkins, and save perhaps for Baldwin, whose forays into high-profile sitcom and credit-card pitching hamstring his range.
Nearing eighty, Allen is still master of the medium, tells a good joke, and gives us something to look forward to, even if his own human frailty is on copious display before us.
She breathlessly spills details of her life to her traveling companion, all the way through the baggage claim. The punch line, of course, is that her companion is a stranger, an unlucky seatmate, and Jasmine is already a bit unhinged.
Jasmine—whose billionaire husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), hung himself in prison after being tossed away for various white-collar crimes (read: Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, et al.)—has nowhere safe to land. And neither, in a way, does Woody Allen.
Long gone are his love and his eye for the Big Apple. So too, his San Francisco has very little real feel; it is a vision from his imagination, with cardboard cutout characters, albeit some funny ones. There are desultory shots of the bay and Alcatraz, as well as a fancy beachside deck in the Hamptons and a few Upper East Side boutiques, but the action of “Blue Jasmine” is all interior.
Forced to live with Ginger, whose tattooed, dopey, but good-hearted boyfriend, Chili (Bobby Cannavale), she considers white trash, Jasmine attempts to resurrect her life. She takes a job as an assistant to an uncomfortably amorous dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) and enrolls in a computer course at night so she can take an online course in interior design (a minor joke there).
Then Jasmine meets a suave, wealthy State Department employee, Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard). At this point, through an implausible set of circumstances—one of which involves having defrauded Ginger and her ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay) out of their lottery winnings—Jasmine’s past catches up with her.
One cannot help but wonder: Is Allen doing cinematic penance for his sins? With each succeeding movie, the theme of marital infidelity with a much younger woman gets stronger. In “Blue Jasmine,” Hal’s serial adultery, culminating in an off-camera tryst with a teenage au pair, becomes an important plot point.
The film also has Allen’s characteristic satiric bite, if not outright hostility toward the phoniness of an upper-crust urban lifestyle. But isn’t that very Park Avenue milieu his own? And Allen seems to be increasingly deluding himself with his romanticized notions, whether of working-class heroism and purity or the European bohemianism of past films. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Woody’s analyst’s office!
Whatever his sins, Allen always cuts to the bone. The domestic drama and dialogue have undeniable power and a feeling of psychological honesty. In an early scene that is both funny and poignant, Chili and a sidekick, like naïve children, pepper Jasmine with questions about her past and her plans, as she struggles to keep her composure.
What elevates “Blue Jasmine” far above the ordinary is Blanchett’s mesmerizing performance, a shoo-in for Best Actress. It has elements of great stage theatricality as much as movie magnetism. Blanchett may be our finest living actor. The cast around her is uniformly excellent, especially Hawkins, and save perhaps for Baldwin, whose forays into high-profile sitcom and credit-card pitching hamstring his range.
Nearing eighty, Allen is still master of the medium, tells a good joke, and gives us something to look forward to, even if his own human frailty is on copious display before us.