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Theresa Montierro Film Review: Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine Is Perhaps His Cruelest-Ever Film10 Years AgoTheresa
Montierro Film Review: Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine Is Perhaps His Cruelest-Ever
Film
Theresa Montierro Film Review
As my friend and colleague Peter
Biskind says, Blue Jasmine is the first Woody Allen film
in a while that doesn’t feel like a promising draft that might have benefited
from another run through the typewriter. Rather, I think the writer-director
accomplished exactly what he set out to accomplish this time. It’s just, I’m
not sure how much I liked the result. It’s not you, Woody, it’s me.
Blue Jasmine might
be Allen’s cruelest film ever, which is saying something, since this is a
director who’s never been particularly generous toward his characters. In
significant ways, though, it’s also one of Allen’s most human movies. Mild
spoiler alert: this is a film that draws deep from the well of A
Streetcar Named Desire. Cate Blanchett, who has played Blanche du Bois
onstage, is here cast as an updated version of Tennessee Williams’s
anti-heroine, Blanche’s reveries about a faded Southern aristocracy replaced
with contemporary delusions bred by life as lived among the 1 percent in
Manhattan and the Hamptons. The film begins with Jasmine (née Jeanette) arriving in San Francisco, broke but still flying
first class, the dazed victim of a financial scandal involving her former
husband. Now homeless, she is forced to rely on the comfort of her estranged
sister, Ginger, who is romantically involved with a blue-collar lug named
Chili. (Although we see Chili in a wife-beater, he refrains from
shouting, Hey, Ginnnnn-gerrrrrr!!!!)
Like Streetcar, Blue
Jasmine is the story of Jasmine’s further humbling, of upper-class
pretension dashing against the rock of working-class earthiness; also
like Streetcar, Allen’s work shares its heroine’s snobbery,
the director as appalled as Jasmine by Chili’s and Ginger’s gaucheries, their
lack of interest in high culture, their aspirational void. A scene where Chili
and Ginger try to set up Jasmine, still clinging to her Chanel bag, with a
schlubby, grease-monkey pal of Chili’s is cringe-inducing, though more because
of the writer-director’s condescension toward his working-class characters than
for their cluelessness as matchmakers. That said, Allen does grant Chili and
Ginger good hearts, and as a director he has elevated his occasionally
tone-deaf script by casting Bobby Cannavale and Sally Hawkins, both excellent
here.
I
was glad to see Allen trying to break out of his usual movie universe, that
hermetic Upper East Side fantasyland (extending to Europe) where money is
almost never an issue and even teenagers go to the opera and dig Sidney
Bechet. Blue Jasmine is engaged with contemporary culture and
social politics to a degree that Allen’s films have rarely if ever been since
maybeManhattan. (Though I think in 2013 even a cosseted Park Avenue wife
would know how to use a computer.) And has he ever really tackled class before,
aside from Match Point, which might just as easily have been set in
Balzac’s Paris? The new film means to be a post-crash fable, and the fact that
we leave Jasmine as blind and delusional as we found her is, perhaps, a nice
satirical point (one Elizabeth Warren might appreciate). As human drama,
though, it’s all a bit cruel. Jasmine, you see, is not just blind and
delusional—she is also alcoholic and mentally ill, and looked at one way the
film is a serial humiliation of a woman who, no matter how awful and
pretentious and complicit-or-not in her husband’s crimes she may be, we come to
have affection for. This is thanks in large part to Blanchett, who allows us to
glimpse the fear, panic, and vulnerability beneath Jasmine’s surface, even at
its most lacquered. The performance is like watching a gorgeous vase will
itself to keep from shattering as it falls floorward.
Allen has been cruel to many other of his characters, most
memorably in Crimes and
Misdemeanors, and he’s also left many other characters as prisoners of
their own stasis and delusions—The Purple Rose of Cairo and Vicky
Cristina Barcelona come to mind. But I’m not sure any of those other
characters were quite as fully realized as Jasmine, which is naturally tribute
to Allen and Blanchett and their alchemy together, but it also made the film,
for me, hard to take. (A minority opinion given the reviews I’ve read.) I saw
sadism in it, beyond the usual misanthropy. (Love misanthropy!) Or, put another
way, Blue Jasmine feels like tragedy without catharsis—an
interesting thing to pull off, but not particularly moving or maybe even admirable.
Theresa Montierro
Film Review
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