BLUE JASMINE (2013)
Directed by Woody
Allen
Sony Pictures
Classics, 98 minutes, PG-13.
* *
Cate Blachett’s titular performance raises the only
interesting question in Woody Allen’s latest film: Can a person win a Best
Actress Oscar for starring in a putrid film? Make no mistake about it–this is a
very bad film indeed. Woody Allen has been cranking out films like a latter-day
Mack Sennett and, frankly, I wish he’d just stop–he hasn’t had anything to say
for decades, yet he keeps saying it.
Jasmine has the world on a string–a very thin, frayed one as
it turns out. She’s married to Hal (Alec Baldwin), a world-beater investor who
lavishes her with furs, jewels, designer duds, a beachside mansion, a stepson,
and the wherewithal to live as high-rolling New York socialite/charity maven.
He even promises to help Jasmine’s working-class sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins)
and her mechanic husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) invest windfall lottery
winnings in ways that he promises will relieve their money worries forever. Who
couldn’t see this coming? Hal is as shady as the rainforest, and as crooked as the
tail of the pig he truly is. And when piggie Hal goes to the abattoir (federal
penitentiary), Jasmine goes from riches to rags.
Pretty nice rags, though. To recover from her nervous
breakdown and rebuild her life, Jasmine flees New York for San Francisco, where
now-divorced Ginger lives with her two children. The new tenant she hoped for
was her airheaded boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale), not her condescending,
pill-popping sister. In one of the film’s many continuity errors, Jasmine is
supposed to be flat broke, but she always seems to have cash for taxis,
restaurants, booze, and glamorous threads, the last of which she wears to her community
college courses and beneath the smock she wears at her job as a dental office
receptionist. Blanchett is terrific as a woman on the verge. She plays Jasmine
with such icy calculation that we come to see her as Hal’s feminine
counterpart–one who will either scheme her way to the top, or join him in an
Icarus-like crash and burn. That is to say, Jasmine will either land a new Hal,
or become one of those medicated street people who wander about talking to the
air. Her performance is reminiscent of that of Gena Rowlands in the 1974
classic A Woman Under the Influence–
a volcanic combination of sophistication and psychosis.
I suspect that Allen was trying to show the values and
worldview gaps between the haute
bourgeoisie and the working class. The problem is simple: Donald Trump
understands the working class better than Woody Allen. As a result, once Allen
steps out of the world of cocktail parties, art openings, trendy restaurants, slinky
dresses, and jazz bars–is he aware that any other types of music exist?–he
doesn’t have the slightest idea how people talk, act, play, or work. As a
result, his take on workaday schmoes is more insulting than Jasmine’s. Dr.
Flicker’s (Michael Stuhlberg) attempt to grope Jasmine is ham-handed, creepy,
and insulting to the dental profession. Allen also portrays Ginger as if she’s
a trailer-park low-life ready to bed any guy who feeds her a line. (Her
apartment, by the way, seems pretty nice for a woman who is supposedly
working-class poor.) And are we supposed to believe that Chili has a heart of
gold? He’d better have one, because Allen’s depiction of his mental acuity places
Chili somewhere between a potted plant and a Labrador retriever.
Where will Jasmine end up–in Marin County, or San
Francisco’s Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital? In a story this poorly told,
not even Cate Blanchett can make me give a damn. And I say, no, to an Oscar for the same reason I don’t think a baseball player on a last-place team should
get a Most Valuable Player award.Who needs the magnificent Cate to primp the feathers of a turkey?
Rob Weir
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