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| Blue Jasmine Directed by Woody Allen Four Stars |
By Rollan Schott
And so, here at age 77, Woody Allen has made one of the
great films of his long career, and has drawn from Cate Blanchett one of the
great comic performances by anyone. Allen has always predicated his films on
the vast chasm over which people from different circumstances attempt to
understand one another. His time has come. With income inequality in America
as wide as it has been since the twenties, our public discourse has shifted
toward attempts by both the rich and the poor to pigeon-hole and typecast the
other. Class warfare has no place for humanity.
With this in mind, Blanchett’s Jasmine is a brilliant comic
invention. Broke and unsettled after the obscenely wealthy aristocrat (Alec
Baldwin) who’d swept her off her feet hung himself in jail when he was busted
for fraud and money laundering, she had seen the whole of her assets seized and
is now forced to move in with her struggling sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) in
San Francisco while she gets back on her feet. Jasmine is in the throws of a nervous breakdown. She hallucinates. She is developing an impressive addiction to Valium. Ginger’s world does not make
sense to her.
Familiar trends emerge. Certain viewers may see certain
things. Jasmine is quite literally delusional. The life story she tells a
hapless passenger on the plane to San
Francisco is schmaltzy and rehearsed, and designed to
manufacture false sympathy. She is broke, and yet obliviously tips a hundred
dollars to the cabby that brings her bags up. Ginger is naïve and waiflike. She
spends little effort on her presentation, and indeed seems unaware of her
unkempt beauty. She is divorced, and now floats about with a greasy mechanic
named Chili (Bobby Cannavale) who fights with her ceaselessly and commandeers
her cheaply adorned living room for the boxing match with his bros.
What erupts when Jasmine moves in is nothing less than a
microcosmic class war. We learn that Jasmine’s ex-husband had squandered Ginger
and her first husband’s investment money in a ponzi scheme, and that Ginger has
worked as a grocery store clerk ever since. She has reason to be bitter. But as
the two begin to exchange barbs and accusations, we find frequently that they
each have a far greater understanding of each others’ shortcomings than they do
of their own. Jasmine laments that Ginger will not aim higher, with her job,
her education, her choice of men. Ginger resents Jasmine for squandering the
small fortune she’d once had, for speaking condescendingly to her, as though
marrying into great wealth amounted to something akin to entrepreneurship, or
qualified her to pass judgment on the less fortunate. Ginger had won money in
the lottery. Both seem ignorant of external circumstances.
Allen observes all of this with a patient, tactful eye.
“Blue Jasmine” moves effortlessly. Allen has become a director whose power lies
in the meaning he instills in modest delivery. It’s a measure that’s made many
of his recent films quaint and forgettable, but here he seems to be simply
staying out of the way of an important message. With its gentle, tasteful music, and
the subdued situational comedy he uses to extrapolate eloquent ideas from the
mundane, this is Woody Allen working with a real purpose for the first time in years.
Maybe decades.
And “Blue Jasmine” is made all the more prescient by Allen’s
unwillingness to let either party off the hook. His politics become complex and
elusive when we accept that both of these bitter sisters are not just right
about each other, but perhaps even both guilty of the same sins, of pride, of
vanity, of the pathological need to define themselves by the men in their
lives. But Jasmine and Ginger are attempting to communicate across the ocean of
circumstance that separates them. They cannot hope to understand, and can we blame
them? Perhaps, in the end, they were both just talking to themselves.
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