Since 1977, Woody Allen has written and directed a feature film nearly every year (1981 is an exception, but he made 2 films apiece in 1987 and 1994, so the average holds). Allen is closing in on 80 years of age, but showing a remarkable work ethic, he keeps pumping out one movie per year. Even in his septuagenarian years, many of these films are good. Some of them are bad, which leads certain denizens of the critical world to claim the good ones a “return to form,” meaning Allen has “returned to form” about six times in the past decade (seven times if, like me, you’re a fan of Whatever Works). Blue Jasmine, I feel pretty confident saying, is one of the good ones.
Lately, in both Allen’s good films and bad, he tells his stories with a laissez faire attitude. Characters are built up and torn apart, romances are ignited and ruined, but each film ends on a note that reaffirms the relative inconsequentiality of the story that precedes it. For the 7 billion people that aren’t affected by Allen’s narrative mechanics, the world goes on just as it did before. Blue Jasmine takes this trait to an extreme, giving us the tragic tale of a fallen socialite before reducing her to a babbling stranger that might sit next to you on a streetcar.
The first scene of Blue Jasmine introduces us to the titular character on a flight from New York to San Francisco as she rambles off her life story to the uninterested passenger beside her. The Ruth Madoff-esque Jasmine was a high society wife, living off the finances of her loaded husband (Alec Baldwin) while remaining conveniently in the dark about his business practices. When the FBI took it all away, she was left in a massive amount of debt and nowhere to go, except her estranged sister’s walk-up apartment in San Francisco.
For the first time in a while, Allen casts his lot with the working class, rather than the bourgeois intellectual crowd that populate most of his films. Jasmine, the cosmopolitan Upper East Sider, is really Jeanette, sister of Ginger (Sally Hawkins), a divorced mom working as a cashier at a supermarket. Ginger’s boyfriend (Bobby Canavale) is loud and obnoxious, a younger version of her ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), who lost a small fortune when Jasmine’s husband was arrested.
All of this rings a little false because Allen’s vision of the working class is as outdated as it is white: a group of boisterous Italians fulfilling stereotypes about the unwashed masses. Like most of his recent films, Blue Jasmine could have used a rewrite, but the ace up the Woodman’s sleeve is Blanchett, who transitions from problem-free society women (as depicted in frequent flashbacks to better times) to delusional neurotic with an unnerving fluidity. It’s not disdain that Jasmine has for Ginger and her friends, but a kind of cognitive dissonance that allows her to patronize the very people who are helping her.
Allen is infamously hands-off with his players, which shows that Blanchett is just fucking good at acting. She nails the Jasmine’s narcissism, alcoholism, and neuroses without ever pulling the character too far in any direction. Jasmine doesn’t converse with the people in her new setting so much as direct her narcissism in their general direction. She pathologically recites the details of her fall from grace, rationalizes her actions, justifies her behaviour, and constantly rewrites her narrative in a futile attempt to cast herself as a victim. Jasmine is an awful condescending parasite, but Blanchett finds a way to root her delusions in insecurity rather than vanity.
Lately, Allen seems capable of making a good film only when he’s able to latch on to a narrative hook with some sort of passion. Midnight in Paris worked because the idea of Woody Allen (or Owen Wilson’s Woody Allen surrogate), interacting with figures of the Lost Generation is an almost too-perfect fit. In comparison, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and To Rome With Love, his other most recent films, fail to leave any lasting impression. This is probably because, between the two films’ handful of story lines, only one is even remotely interesting (that would Alec Baldwin reminiscing on his love life in Rome).
I’m not sure if Allen latched on to the irony of a high-class woman forced to ask for help from the working class family she left behind or if Blanchett found something human and engaging under Jasmine’s delusional veneer. But whoever was impassioned by the material (probably both artists) made it work. Woody seems to be the only working filmmaker who gets away with positing nihilism as a rational world-view, but post-recession America, with its trampled hopes and dreams, is perhaps more suited to Allen’s existential pessimism than even he would admit. With Blue Jasmine, America has caught up with Woody.
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Alan Jones writes about film for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.
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