If you pinch a grown adult, there’s relatively no consequence, and it will not hurt. Pinch a baby, however, and the baby will begin bawling as if that is the worst pain they’ve ever felt. Because for them, it is: all pain is relative. So you’ll have to forgive Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), the over-sharing lead in Blue Jasmine who assumes the world shares her pain, the pain of being knocked out of the penthouse and into a lower middle class existence. It’s hard out here for the wealthy.
Blue Jasmine cuts back and forth in time, visiting Jasmine before the financial disaster that sent her husband (Alec Baldwin) to prison and after, where she struggles to get along with her supportive sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). Ginger and Jasmine (formerly Jeanette, she says, as if she were exhibiting endless ingenuity) don’t seem related to anyone around them, and they’re quick to remind that they aren’t, both of them adopted. But while Ginger has settled into a quiet, manageable lifestyle as a divorced mom in San Francisco, Jasmine can’t manage to adjust to her “modest” surroundings, announcing plans for a more frugal lifestyle as she complains about the first class flight on the way there while sipping champagne.
The flickers of Jasmine’s early life are all upper crust Hamptons easy living. Husband Hal always has plans; sometimes they involve Jasmine, eating and dining at the finest restaurants with similarly frou-frou company. Often, however, they do not. The perspective of the film seems inconsistent, as the flashbacks appear to be Jasmine’s memories, though we see moments through the eyes of others, like the various younger lovers Hal takes on the side. His whole life is one of duplicity: massive investments are placed in his care, only to land in his pocket when deals go south, businesses mysteriously never materialize, and the market “fluctuates.”
One of these victims is Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), Ginger’s working class husband. Their initial meeting reveals the distance between the two of them. Augie, a blustery, talkative type, barely fits his broad shoulders into his cheeseball windbreaker and Hal reacts as if he’s worried he’ll catch gangrene, clutching the lapel of his suit. It’s a small role with a number of standout scenes, but would you guess that Clay, the former shock comic, gives one of the film’s most real and lived-in performances? Clay’s always been cinematic: he holds the center of Renny Harlin’s gonzo action noir The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane with ease. Now he gets to be tragic, and he’s every goombah on the corner with a broken heart and a wasted life, cursing the sky.
In the present day, Ginger has opted for a younger, sleeker model of the same thing, another slick-talking oaf with endless charm. As played by Bobby Cannavale, he has an overt working class sensuality that overwhelms everyone around him, particularly Jasmine, who can’t shake her class contempt for those near to her. Hal may have been a cheater, a liar and a criminal, but he rescued her from an indifferent college lifestyle and granted her the sort of wealth only seen in the dreams of princesses. It’s her transition from still being in love with the past towards accepting the future that proves to be Jasmine’s arc, though the latter part of that may prove impossible.
This sympathy-for-the-rich angle is an intriguing, though off-putting, strategy for Woody Allen. This is his 855th movie as a director, and it’s interesting to see how the world may have left him behind a bit. Allen is in the One Percent and has been for decades now; the fact that he fled New York a short while ago to make movies overseas had to do with financing, but it also had to do with a New York he no longer recognized. By the time he returned, there was no middle class, or upper middle class, of which he could relate. The city has priced out the characters from films like Annie Hall and Manhattan Murder Mystery. The only people left are the grotesquely wealthy and the squatting lower class, many of whom are minorities. Quick, name Allen’s last film with more than one primary minority cast member.
In this case, his solution seems to have been to port over the last remnants of New York to San Francisco. Clay and Cannavale give hairy-chested, full-bodied New Yorker performances, and even Cannavale’s double-date buddy, a pushy, mustached Max Casella, seems to have a little of that Big Apple swagger. Michael Stuhlbarg’s lovelorn dentist, meanwhile, seems like he’s been working on the east side taking Allen characters as patients for a long time now. A new beau for Ginger ends up being a neurotic, chatty Allen-type, and he’s played by Louis C.K., a performer who has found the poetry in the city that Allen long ago lost in his FX show Louie.
Jasmine is nothing if not self-destructive, easing down from every harsh day amongst the plebes with a glass of wine, and maybe a yelling match or two. It takes wealth to sing her siren song, and she finds that in a loaded real estate agent (Peter Sarsgaard), though she deals with him by using her only remaining currency, lies. Blanchett, one of our great actresses, finds the humor of this character within the tragedy, and it is a performance that doesn’t play the wink, it doesn’t address the elephant in the room that she’s a classically deluded comic creation. Blanchett, an endlessly resourceful actress, has created a brilliant characterization that is unlike any seen in an Allen film from the last decade, maybe longer. Everyone’s usually quite good in an Allen film (with the exception of Anything Else) but rarely do they outshine such a skilled ensemble with this much flair.
Den of Geek Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars