OVP: Blue Jasmine (2013)

Film: Blue Jasmine (2013)

Stars: Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Bobby Cannavale, Alec Baldwin, Peter Sarsgaard, Louis C.K.

Director: Woody Allen

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Cate Blanchett*, Supporting Actress-Sally Hawkins, Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I frequently state that I wish I lived in a Woody Allen movie, and I think with Blue Jasmine, Woody may have taken that to heart a bit, and had some fun at my expense.  In the film, Jasmine, an adopted moniker of Cate Blanchett’s Jeanette, for all intents and purposes lives in two different worlds.  There is the world of her past, a glittery, Allen-esque combination of Manhattan boutiques, society luncheons, and banter-filled cocktail parties, and on the other hand is Woody’s version of the rest of America: drab, filled with beer and football and yellow kitchens.  These two worlds collide when Jasmine’s husband Hal (Baldwin) pulls a Bernie Madoff and runs off with all of his client’s money (including Jasmine’s sister Ginger, played by Sally Hawkins, who had gotten a big break when she won $250K in the lottery).  This leaves Jasmine destitute, and forced to live with her sister after enduring a mental breakdown.

(Spoilers Ahead) This, oddly enough, is where the film starts.  While we learn through flashback the how and the why behind Hal’s fall, it’s never really the focus, a refreshing change for our cause-and-effect movie culture.  Instead, the focus is on Jasmine’s move to regular life, and her shift away from sanity.  The film alternates mostly between Blanchett's Jasmine, a statuesque woman of breeding, sophistication, and intelligence, and Hawkins' Ginger, a sweet but down-on-her-luck gal who blames most of her troubles in comparison to Jasmine's on how she didn't have good genes (they were both adopted, allowing Allen to get away with casting two actors who could not look less alike if they tried).

The movie continues with Ginger and Jasmine growing more distant from each other, and Jasmine's psychosis getting worse and worse.  First she has to degrade herself by realizing that she has no skills, and then decides to go back to school, but first must learn how to use a computer before she can take design classes online.  To do this, she becomes a receptionist to a dentist (played by a creepy Michael Stuhlberg), and eventually she seems to almost be in an all-is-well moment with Peter Sarsgaard, a rich diplomat trying desperately to start a career in politics, and clearly picking Blanchett because she'll look good next to him while giving speeches.  The Woody of yesteryear, I suspect, would have left his movie at that, with Blanchett learning absolutely nothing from her experience and instead falling into another life of decadence with a seemingly corrupt man.

However, eventually Sarsgaard's character does find out about Jasmine, and she must find another person to coast off of, or at the very least end up in the gutter (which is what the final shot of Jasmine, leaving her sister who has foolishly fallen back with her loser boyfriend, hints toward).  The movie shows that at this point Jasmine, always living in the past, will never really recover from what her husband did to her, and more to the point, what she did to herself (in the best twist of the movie, we learn that it was Blanchett who had anonymously called the police on her husband-had she not done that, she would have been alone, but her millions of dollars and way of life would have remained intact).

The movie suffers quite a bit from a balance problem.  Blanchett overpowers every actor in the film, despite there being a plethora of excellent performers in the movie-every time she's not onscreen, you're wondering why she isn't onscreen, what's happening with Jasmine.  This balance problem hurts Hawkins, who is the next most significant actor in the film, with her character appearing far less interesting and too easy to toss aside for my liking.  Look, for example, at her objectively funny scenes with a horny Louis C.K., that go nowhere and when it's revealed that he's married (an assumption I think most of us had made) it makes her arc back to her boyfriend all the more simplistic.

In addition, I know that they were both adopted, but it's impossible to believe that two siblings could be so dissimilar.  If you think about it, most if not all siblings as adults are relatively similar to one another, both in their understanding of their siblings, as well as in their forgivenesses of them.  A great example of this would be the film that is clearly inspiring the bulk of the movie, A Streetcar Named Desire, where Blanche and Stella are vastly dissimilar in their attitudes toward men, the arts, and money, but both share a sisterly bond that comes from their background (thinking of their gossiping scenes with each other, and Stella's eventual loyalty to Blanche over Stanley).  Hawkins and Blanchett don't share that, and it makes their emotional attachment to one another seem arbitrary and out-of-place.

But I feel I'm being too harsh, and while the plot has problems, the performance from Blanchett is really top drawer, and worth the price of admission.  Blanchett, an actress that combines Kate Hepburn and Grace Kelly in a way no one else comes close to, regally commands every scene, watching her sanity slip from her, and she excels at the louder, more boisterous moments that Jasmine finds herself in (Blanchett, an actress that has never excelled at the subtle, plays to her strengths here).

And those are my thoughts on Woody's latest, but what are yours?  Did you enjoy Blue Jasmine, and where does it rank against his recent successes (Match Point, Vicky Cristina, and Midnight in Paris)?  And which actress do you hope becomes his muse next?