Although Woody Allen is definitely showing signs of repetition in his technique, you don't fix what isn't broken. Blue Jasmine is a stylish, eloquent, funny, and very realistic take on a trophy wife's fall from grace after her husband is exposed as a fraudulent, tax evading Bernie Madoff spoof. The film juxtaposes flashbacks to Jasmine's rich and spoiled past and her present state of affairs expertly, and although it definitely jumps around, the story is remarkably fluid. It might not reach the classic status of Allen's early-period films, but it's definitely a beautiful showcase of what this great director is capable of.
Blue Jasmine stars Cate Blanchett as the title character, a former Manhattan socialite forced out of her home and stripped of her money by the government. She is forced to move in with her sister in San Francisco. This is where my review becomes a little biased, as San Francisco is both my home city and the best city ever (what a coincidence!). So any film shot here is definitely going to get a bit of a bump in the Final Score. However, something annoyed me about this aspect of the film: When Allen films a city (New York, Rome, Paris), he makes a habit of romanticizing it. So why not do that for San Francisco, the original city of love? It smacks of East Coast pretentiousness.
However, the movie is superb. Cate Blanchett plays the part of a mentally unstable rags-to-riches-to-rags-again character with precision, believability, and grace. There's not a moment in which her tour de force becomes anything less than gripping. The supporting cast is also great, featuring Peter Sarsgaard, Alec Baldwin, Louis CK, and Andrew Dice Clay as... well... Andrew Dice Clay. This might be one of the best casting decisions of all time, as the innate unlikability that Clay carries with him makes the character even more obnoxious. Clay hasn't seemed to notice that audiences don't care for him, so everyone else is content to laugh at him behind his back.
The real achievement in Blue Jasmine is the resistance to making Jasmine a sympathetic character. She's a definite antihero, and at no point in this movie did I want things to end well for her. It's never quite clear whether she's willfully ignorant of her husband's law-bending, or if she's just apathetic and naive. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter, as both of these actions are reprehensible in their own ways.
The story is inspired, but the dialogue is really what makes this movie. It clicks along rapidly, never slowing down or giving the audience a breath. Even though a lot of themes and cliches seem recycled from previous Allen movies, it's not enough to drag Blue Jasmine down at all. Like Christopher Nolan, Allen tends to reuse his actors, but Alec Baldwin is perfectly cast here. After seeing him as the Capital One Venture card guy, you can't help but think that he's a little sleazy.
Much like his earlier films, Allen doesn't seem to feel the need to provide closure to this story. It ends with Jasmine just as despondent and seemingly hopeless as she was when the story began. But somehow, everyone else's lives have improved because of her. Perhaps it's just because she provides the perfect example of what not to do for people, but she's definitely had a positive effect on her sister's life by the end. And even if she didn't get to marry the State Department guy and go off to Vienna, you get the feeling that she won't have too much trouble becoming someone else's trophy wife further down the line.
Final Score for Blue Jasmine: 8/10 stars. If this were the first Woody Allen movie I had seen, I would probably have loved it, but I've seen enough of his other work to know that this is not his best. He has absolutely no range when it comes to the feel and themes of his films, but he's so assured in his direction that it doesn't matter. It's an articulate, authentic, thought-provoking film that could actually make you feel sorry for rich people. And that's an incredible feat just on its own.
No comments:
Post a Comment