With 'Blue Jasmine', Woody Allen has managed to come up with a film that invites comparisons with one great work from theatrical history as well as a more recent true-life story, ripped from the headlines involving the financial world. He cleverly merges these two disparate stories into a fairly gripping tale that will keep your interest to the end, but eschews the complex references from his source material, which make those narratives, much more compelling.
Jasmine, Allen's anti-heroine, is obviously based on Ruth Madoff, who was married to Bernie Madoff, who committed the greatest Ponzi scheme in history. In the film, the Madoff character is 'Hal' (Alec Baldwin), a mega-rich investment counselor who ends up being arrested and kills himself while in prison (in real life, of course, it's Ruth's eldest son, who ends up committing suicide). Jasmine moves to San Francisco, moving in with her working class sister, which invites comparisons with Ruth, who moved in with her sister for a while, down in Florida. In the film, Jasmine has one son, who ends up moving to California, who she's estranged from. The real-life Ruth was estranged from her two sons but eventually, I believe, reconciled.
'Blue Jasmine' jumps back and forth in time, as the seemingly tragic tale of Jasmine unfolds. When she moves in with her sister, it becomes obvious that Woody Allen is developing his story by taking a page from the Tennessee Williams play book. Jasmine, bearing a striking resemblance to Blanche Dubois from 'Streetcar named Desire', is now caught up in a love triangle involving her sister Ginger, and her new working class lover, Chilli (played by Bobby Cannavale), who also appears to be Woody's version of 'Stanley Kowalski'. While I loved Cannavale in 'Boardwalk Empire', and think he's a great character actor, 'Chilli' is not as complex a character as Williams' Stanley Kowalski. Cannavale's character (along with some of the other characters including Ginger's ex, played by Andrew Dice Clay) seem more like they belong in 'The Sopranos' or 'The Jersey Shore', than denizens of San Francisco.
As the story moves along, Jasmine continues to maintain the illusion that she's important and seeks to restore her social status, which was ripped from her, following her husband's arrest. Woody Allen wants us to feel some sympathy for Jasmine after her employer, a dentist, sexually harasses her. Jasmine's initial plan is to take an online course to become computer literate and later become an interior designer (isn't it more likely that she could find a tutor to help her with computer skills?).
Finally, Jasmine realizes that her salvation is in finding another rich man to assist her in maintaining her past lifestyle. The way she handles her romance with Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a State Department employee, who has aspirations to become a Congressman, is indicative of her ongoing delusional frame of mind: of course she'll be eventually found out, if Dwight runs for office! But so determined to return to the good graces of the nouveau riche, she'll ignore the obvious fact, that there's no chance in hell of her ever escaping the watchful eye of the media (I doubt in real life that Ruth Madoff would have been so delusional, that she would entertain the thought of marrying herself off to an aspiring politician and actually believe that she could then escape discovery of her sordid past).
The high point of Woody Allen's plot work comes when Dwight finds out about Jasmine's subterfuge. I was expecting Chilli to spill the beans (no pun intended), but it's actually Andrew Dice Clay's character, Augie, Ginger's ex, who happens to run in to Dwight and Jasmine by chance on the street, and pours out bitter feelings of being betrayed, both by Jasmine and Hal.
There's also a sub-plot that moves quite nicely, involving Ginger having an affair with a kindly audio engineer, Al. Chilli blames Jasmine for causing Ginger to regard him as a low life but in a nice plot reversal, Al turns out to have been cheating on Ginger all along. Did Chilli get to Al's wife and let him know what was going on? Or did the wife, simply figure things out on her own?
In the end, 'Blue Jasmine' is a derivative tale that manages to entertain. Cate Blanchett, who reminds me of a middle-aged Lauren Bacall, does well in attempting to remind us of Blanche Dubois, stuck in unrelenting self-illusion. The problem is that Woody Allen doesn't know his 'Blanche Dubois' character personally as Tennessee Williams did. Thus, we 'get' Jasmine's self-illusion act in the first thirty minutes. The character arc remains the same and that's exactly Allen's point: the character never learns and never grows. Perhaps Blanchett's best scene is where she confronts Hal at the end, when she finally accuses him of infidelity. But Jasmine's whole history, feels superficial; Woody conveys the superficiality of Jasmine's lifestyle in a schematic way, not like the complicated fictional character of a Blanche, or a real-life Ruth.
While Jasmine's one-note character is one of the film's limitations, Woody Allen does manage to come out on the right side of the film's main ethical question. Should we in the end, view Jasmine as a sympathetic figure? Woody, I believe, says no. After all, Jasmine wasn't planning to marry Dwight because she loved him—she simply wanted to be re-established, in her former world of luxury, and continue to look down on all the 'little people', who she regarded as her social inferiors.
As a director who has immersed himself for years in the history of film, Woody Allen continues to churn out decent, 'journeyman' work of late. Don't expect any great poetry or descriptive narrative based on a complex historical world, but this is a director who knows how to cast and work very well with an excellent crew of actors and create a story, which moves quite decently, from A to Z.
Jasmine, Allen's anti-heroine, is obviously based on Ruth Madoff, who was married to Bernie Madoff, who committed the greatest Ponzi scheme in history. In the film, the Madoff character is 'Hal' (Alec Baldwin), a mega-rich investment counselor who ends up being arrested and kills himself while in prison (in real life, of course, it's Ruth's eldest son, who ends up committing suicide). Jasmine moves to San Francisco, moving in with her working class sister, which invites comparisons with Ruth, who moved in with her sister for a while, down in Florida. In the film, Jasmine has one son, who ends up moving to California, who she's estranged from. The real-life Ruth was estranged from her two sons but eventually, I believe, reconciled.
'Blue Jasmine' jumps back and forth in time, as the seemingly tragic tale of Jasmine unfolds. When she moves in with her sister, it becomes obvious that Woody Allen is developing his story by taking a page from the Tennessee Williams play book. Jasmine, bearing a striking resemblance to Blanche Dubois from 'Streetcar named Desire', is now caught up in a love triangle involving her sister Ginger, and her new working class lover, Chilli (played by Bobby Cannavale), who also appears to be Woody's version of 'Stanley Kowalski'. While I loved Cannavale in 'Boardwalk Empire', and think he's a great character actor, 'Chilli' is not as complex a character as Williams' Stanley Kowalski. Cannavale's character (along with some of the other characters including Ginger's ex, played by Andrew Dice Clay) seem more like they belong in 'The Sopranos' or 'The Jersey Shore', than denizens of San Francisco.
As the story moves along, Jasmine continues to maintain the illusion that she's important and seeks to restore her social status, which was ripped from her, following her husband's arrest. Woody Allen wants us to feel some sympathy for Jasmine after her employer, a dentist, sexually harasses her. Jasmine's initial plan is to take an online course to become computer literate and later become an interior designer (isn't it more likely that she could find a tutor to help her with computer skills?).
Finally, Jasmine realizes that her salvation is in finding another rich man to assist her in maintaining her past lifestyle. The way she handles her romance with Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a State Department employee, who has aspirations to become a Congressman, is indicative of her ongoing delusional frame of mind: of course she'll be eventually found out, if Dwight runs for office! But so determined to return to the good graces of the nouveau riche, she'll ignore the obvious fact, that there's no chance in hell of her ever escaping the watchful eye of the media (I doubt in real life that Ruth Madoff would have been so delusional, that she would entertain the thought of marrying herself off to an aspiring politician and actually believe that she could then escape discovery of her sordid past).
The high point of Woody Allen's plot work comes when Dwight finds out about Jasmine's subterfuge. I was expecting Chilli to spill the beans (no pun intended), but it's actually Andrew Dice Clay's character, Augie, Ginger's ex, who happens to run in to Dwight and Jasmine by chance on the street, and pours out bitter feelings of being betrayed, both by Jasmine and Hal.
There's also a sub-plot that moves quite nicely, involving Ginger having an affair with a kindly audio engineer, Al. Chilli blames Jasmine for causing Ginger to regard him as a low life but in a nice plot reversal, Al turns out to have been cheating on Ginger all along. Did Chilli get to Al's wife and let him know what was going on? Or did the wife, simply figure things out on her own?
In the end, 'Blue Jasmine' is a derivative tale that manages to entertain. Cate Blanchett, who reminds me of a middle-aged Lauren Bacall, does well in attempting to remind us of Blanche Dubois, stuck in unrelenting self-illusion. The problem is that Woody Allen doesn't know his 'Blanche Dubois' character personally as Tennessee Williams did. Thus, we 'get' Jasmine's self-illusion act in the first thirty minutes. The character arc remains the same and that's exactly Allen's point: the character never learns and never grows. Perhaps Blanchett's best scene is where she confronts Hal at the end, when she finally accuses him of infidelity. But Jasmine's whole history, feels superficial; Woody conveys the superficiality of Jasmine's lifestyle in a schematic way, not like the complicated fictional character of a Blanche, or a real-life Ruth.
While Jasmine's one-note character is one of the film's limitations, Woody Allen does manage to come out on the right side of the film's main ethical question. Should we in the end, view Jasmine as a sympathetic figure? Woody, I believe, says no. After all, Jasmine wasn't planning to marry Dwight because she loved him—she simply wanted to be re-established, in her former world of luxury, and continue to look down on all the 'little people', who she regarded as her social inferiors.
As a director who has immersed himself for years in the history of film, Woody Allen continues to churn out decent, 'journeyman' work of late. Don't expect any great poetry or descriptive narrative based on a complex historical world, but this is a director who knows how to cast and work very well with an excellent crew of actors and create a story, which moves quite decently, from A to Z.