Blue Jasmine Review

After taking trips to Paris and Rome, Woody Allen returns to the States - including his beloved New York City - in Blue Jasmine, one of the director's finest features in recent memory.  Whereas New York has often been a romanticized locale for Allen, here, it takes on a more menacing shape, a sinister truth lurking beneath the city's elegant facade.  New York represents an idealized past, a fantasy past and present, a memory that pill-popping Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) can't fully pull herself away from, so glamorous, so apparently easy, so magnetic is the shiny life she left behind.

Jasmine finds herself broke and living with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) in San Francisco while she tries to get back on her feet, following the revelation that her husband Hal (Alec Badlwin) was a financial fraud living large off of other people's mismanaged money.  Blue Jasmine seamlessly cuts between scenes of Jasmine trying to make her way in San Francisco - taking computer classes, working as a receptionist at a dental office, looking for a new man to take care of her - and flashbacks of her cushy life in New York with Hal.

The New York scenes comprise a sort of unmade Woody Allen film of yesteryear, with Jasmine making the most of the city that never sleeps, even as Hal sneaks around with other women.  Jasmine buys into the lavish lifestyle Hal provides her, never questioning his business trips or paying heed to the rumors that swirl around her circle of friends.  Jasmine is immersed in the romantic vision of rich married life in New York, unaware of the darker tinge Allen wields in featuring his favorite city.

The film is especially sly in juxtaposing scenes of Ginger and ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) visiting New York City with Jasmine's arrival in San Francisco.  The chasm between Jasmine's life and Ginger's is never more apparently wider, nor is the difference in their character or sense of familial devotion.  Whereas Ginger puts plans to marry her boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale) on hold so Jasmine can stay with her, Jasmine struggles to find any time to spend with her sister, lamely making the vaguest of excuses to avoid going to dinner.  Only when Auggie reveals that he's come into some money from the lottery do Hal and Jasmine perk up, making Ginger and Auggie yet another pair of victims in Hal's financial scheme.

San Francisco, then, becomes a symbol of reality, uglier, duller, less forgiving than the life Jasmine so misses.  The people she meets look like actual people and struggle to make ends meet.  And through Ginger's romantic forays, Allen reveals that the she is the woman that Jasmine has pretended to be.  Though Jasmine puts on the mask of a victim, too quick to trust and oblivious to Hal's schemes, there's more to her than meets the eye, a sharper mind and a more discerning eye than some of the New York scenes lead viewers to believe.

Cate Blanchett, as Jasmine, gives one of the best performances I've ever seen on film.  All of the complexities of the story, the dynamics that color New York and San Francisco in different but complementary colors, the tightrope walk between comedy and tragedy that make the film such a fascinating, confusing ride, are condensed and explored with mad brilliance in Blanchett's performance.  She simultaneously makes Jasmine a sympathetic character and a repulsive leech, delivering her lines with such full-speed confidence that one can't help but feel at least a little bit sorry for her.  Blanchett plays crazy with a steady hand and a venomous tongue, chewing through Allen's sly dialogue and finding such a rare balance in her delivery that certain lines had my eyes welling with tears even as I couldn't help but laugh.  Blanchett makes Jasmine a force of unpredictable nature, but provides the emotional and intellectual structure beneath that pays off in the film's final scenes, when Jasmine is revealed in all her manipulative, infuriating glory.

The supporting cast impresses, too.  Hawkins gives Ginger an inherent sweetness and a downtrodden gusto that provide a lighter subplot to Jasmine's tougher-to-digest journey.   Baldwin impresses with relatively little screentime, just barely letting Hal's charm cover his subtle menace.

When one considers that Allen has been making a movie a year for more than three decades, it's impossible not to be in awe at how prolific, sharp, and witty he remains.  With Blue Jasmine, as with Midnight in Paris a couple years ago, Allen has crafted a film that speaks volumes to its time, boiling down current events into a story and a set of characters who are impossible to look away from.  While doing so, he's led yet another actress into career-best work, as he often does.  Seeing Blue Jasmine is seeing one of cinema's great masters at work, as perceptive and sly now as he was forty years ago.