Blue Jasmine is a distortion and finally an erosion of the familiar Woody Allen character study, a film that is smart and unrelenting, but flawed. This is still a movie inseparably tied to Woody Allen – the jazz soundtrack and the basic Allen idiosyncrasies remain. The titular Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is, in short, the extreme end of any upper-class socialite who has ever inhabited a Woody Allen movie. The difference is that Jasmine is quickly processed through a gauntlet of public humiliation from which she cannot recover. For better or worse, this is the rare Allen film whose tragic ambitions are not at all masked by his comedy.
Jasmine’s husband Hal is a manifestation of the Madoff scandal, an exceptionally rich man who does undefined rich man things professionally, a rich man who goes to prison for corrupt financing, where he hangs himself. Jasmine leaves New York for San Francisco to live with her working-class sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), only after having a mental breakdown, found talking to strangers in the street.
Hal had been with other women for years, taking most of Jasmine’s social circle to bed at one point or another and it takes Jasmine years to discover the obvious. She has trapped herself in a social fantasy wherein lies are the normal mode of discourse. Hal tells friends that he fell in love with the name Jasmine – of course her given name is not Jasmine but Jeannette; her very name is a fallacy created in a socio-economic fantasyland.
Allen opens in the precise fashion that I have in discussing his film; that is, with Jasmine as the center of attention and Ginger trailing somewhere behind. Indeed, Jasmine and Ginger are first presented as a dichotomy of social forms. Jasmine has forever been outfitted as the superior. Even the sister’s adoptive parents preferred Jasmine. Ginger often remarks upon Jasmine’s “superior genes,” a statement which is important for Ginger’s self-image of inferiority. Ginger’s presence becomes more palpable as the film proceeds, as she emerges from her perception of Jasmine as the better one. There is a sense of balance in their lives – Jasmine defines her success against Ginger’s failures and vice versa. Jasmine’s nervous breakdown is somehow necessary for Ginger’s life to proceed.
Jasmine’s psychosis comes from her lost social status, but more broadly from the fact that she cannot freely manufacture a personality any longer; that is, she cannot buy a personality. It is the collision of fantasy and reality: Jasmine behaves how the Woody Allen pseudo-intellectual is expected to behave in the situation. In short, the death of Jasmine’s social status effectually kills the whole person.
This is a messy, important theme that is not wholly original, but is astonishing in the hands of Woody Allen and Blanchett as Jasmine. Without Blanchett, Blue Jasmine simply could not exist. Jasmine’s tragedy might easily have been maudlin by a lesser actress; Blanchett’s work collects and congeals all the emotions of the movie.
Blanchett comes close to reconciling Blue Jasmine’s major flaw – the movie ends before it begins. Jasmine is given to us whole in the first scene; her ultimate psychosis is the first thing we learn about her. Jasmine tries to pull herself back up the social ladder, but the attempt is for not against Allen’s essential truisms: the high-class Jasmine cannot really do anything to regain her wealth, because she obtained it by luck to begin with. The stakes are lowered because we know the outcome.
And while Blanchett is flawless as an unstable woman who has lost herself, Allen does not find tonal balance between her performance and the rest of the cast - Blanchett is so dominating as a depressive force that Allen’s sparse comedy feels out of place. Allen’s musical selections work as a microcosm for the whole movie. Highly dramatic scenes are juxtaposed with the happy Dixieland jazz that Woody is famous for – there is no suggestion of humor on the screen, yet here is the same smiling Woody Allen music we’ve heard for years. There’s additionally a bizarre amount of recycled clichés from past Woody Allen movies – Blue Jasmine is inescapably peppered with Woody’s lines and his presence. Jasmine pops Xanex at random intervals throughout. Jasmine, Ginger and friends eat some “bad clams” at lunch just as characters always seem to do in Allen films. Blue Jasmine really might be watched as one big inside joke, constantly referencing the rest of his canon – both genius and slightly insipid.
Blue Jasmine is a clever tapestry of satire and tragedy, at once a culmination of Woody Allen’s filmography and a deviation from it. The problem is that Allen’s ambitions for high tragedy require more than the Woody Allen structure minus jokes. His actors succeed in making sense of his complicated screenplay, but do not resolve the convoluted balance between Woody Allen, who got his start as a stand-up comedian, and Woody Allen, the dramatist.
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