As painful and precise a character study as Woody Allen has
ever made, Blue Jasmine is built
around an incredible performance by Cate Blanchett. She plays Jasmine, a New
York City socialite whose banker husband’s financial malfeasance resulted in a
rare prison sentence for him. The legal proceedings wiped out their collective
wealth and now she’s stuck living with her working class sister (Sally Hawkins)
in a tiny apartment in San Francisco. Allen deftly cuts between flashbacks that
swim with ostentatious wealth – palatial vacation homes, richly decorated
ballrooms, apartments with wide spaces filled with elegant bric-a-brac – and
her daily struggle to survive post-scandal. We hear that some time before the
film’s present day she was found alone in the street babbling to herself.
Coming out of a flashback, the camera sometimes finds her in the corner of the
frame, muttering and mumbling about the events we’ve just seen. As the film
slowly fills in the full picture of the downfall of her riches and her husband,
it’s clear that this damaged woman so tenuously restarting her life is a woman
well past the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’s deep in the midst of it, with
only fleeting slivers of hope of making it to the other side.
What we have here is a duet between a master filmmaker and a
virtuoso performer. Blanchett is remarkably fragile, broken in deeply neurotic
ways that run well past the typical Allen type. Here she’s a woman in the
middle of a self-deception. Although she’s broke, has barely a cent to her
name, she’s stuck in a wealthy state of mind that keeps her realities from
sneaking into her consciousness too deeply. Her husband (Alec Baldwin) was a
man who kept her in the dark about his business practices, but she was complicit
in that lack of information. She enjoyed the rewards too much. In a potent
metaphor for recent economic turmoil, he’s caught in the wrongdoings while
she’s the one left to scramble with nothing, not even able to fully process
what she’s lost. (Of course, that the legal system actually punished this bad
banker is a cinematic fantasy.) In one of the opening scenes, she’s complaining
to her sister about the conditions of the first class flight that took her to
San Francisco. “I thought you said you were broke,” her sister says. “I am!” Jasmine howls, not seeing the
contradictions that sit so plainly on the surface of her narrative.
Allen sees them, though, and the film is unsparing as it
watches Jasmine struggle. It’s a film that’s scathing and sympathetic, a
contradiction that’s reconciled by the push and pull of the film’s elegantly
composed, beautifully filmic cinemascope cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe
and the raw emotion storming under and cracking through Jasmine’s barely
composed exterior. The film is so cleanly cut, crisply crosscut between past
and present. It’s gorgeously blocked, stretching across the frame with care.
It’s sharply drawn, surrounding the simple story of a woman trying to find some
way to put her life back together with a vividly sketched ensemble of strivers
that counterbalance the emptiness of her aspirations and vacuousness of the
lifestyle she lost.
Her sister’s surrounded by romantic entanglements old and
new, an ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), a current boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale),
and a maybe-new boyfriend (Louis C.K.). They’re all working class guys who draw
the scorn of Jasmine. Their personalities clang against the personalities of
the wealthy guys she had grown used to. “You settle for the men you think you
deserve,” she snaps to her sister. She, on the other hand, sets her sights on a
guy (Peter Sarsgaard) who has eyes on climbing a ladder of social influence. Of
course she can’t tell him who she really is. Is it better to be honest with a
problematic guy you get to know, or dishonest with a guy who remains
unproblematic the less you care to know and care to let him know? The answer
seems clear.
But Jasmine could care less if she’s doing the right thing,
so long as she thinks she is. She has a need to be correct at all times, or at
least a need to be seen as correct. She views every slight, no matter how
minor, as a personal affront. Any potential career starter she views as beneath
her. She wants the results only and wants them now. Told she has to get a job,
she sniffs that the only options for a middle-aged college dropout are
“menial.” But she doesn’t see herself and her reality in the terms she
entertains just long enough to dismiss. She’s an all-American temporarily
disadvantaged millionaire waiting for her ship of money to come in. She simply
doesn’t know what to do with herself until then. The film doesn’t know what to
do with her either, content to show her to us without much else to balance out
the cruelty and emotional damage (to herself and others) following her wherever
she goes. Allen is content to serve up this character portrait, vivid and
wounded, and leave it at that. It’s as invigorating as it is frustrating, a
pained fascination with an uncomfortably complicated character worth turning
over in one’s mind long after she’s off the screen and the credits have rolled.
No comments:
Post a Comment