A Touch Of Class- Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine

 

A Touch Of Class- Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Blue Jasmine, starring Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Alex Baldwin, directed by Woody Allen, 2013

Woody Allen has been excellent in cinematically portraying (and poking fun at) various aspects of growing up absurd in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan, growing up as Jewish kid with a very subtle sense of the outsider coming inside as things changed in the post- World War II American sociological landscape. Changed in the red scare cold war night of the 1950s which charged everyone from Jewish kids in Brooklyn (and those other city locales) to Irish-Catholic kids from Hullsville on the Massachusetts shoreline to turn in vanilla Americans. Check. Woody Allen has been excellent in cinematically portraying the East Coast-West Coast culturati warfare (now decidedly won by the Left Coast). Check. Woody Allen has been excellent in transferring his comedic writing and directing skills to Europe over the past few films. Check. Which leads us to the few under review, Blue Jasmine,  his updated echo of Tennessee Williams’ dramatic look (Street Car Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, with a touch of Suddenly, Last Summer)  at how the mighty (or one mighty) has followed in the post-2008 world of high stakes high finance.  In short a look at class in contemporary America, a small snapshot of the one-sided class war where the good guys are not winning but maybe, just maybe they will survive.        

We have known ever since F. Scott Fitzgerald that the rich, hell, the very rich and not just the ordinary rich, are different, very different, from you and me and Woody here tries to rub our noses in this difference even when the rich are on the way down, down into the mean streets (here of Frisco town). I am not altogether convinced, at least off of this film presentation, that he succeeded in that effort. What I am convinced of though is that Cate Blanchett (and to a lesser extent Bobby Cannavale and Sally Hawkins as two working –class characters) saved his bacon on this one by both breathing life into the character of Jasmine and by flooding the screen with one of the most nuanced performances in her outstanding career.  Beautifully mannered and at home amount the rich and famous or manic, alcoholic and nothing but a drag on company she forced the viewer to deal with her presence. Woody on his own on this one, at least based on the story line and the over the top dialogue, could not have pulled as much power out of this film without that performance.  

Here is why. Through the devise of having to two non-biologically connected sisters (Jasmine and Ginger), the one upscale with great expectation Hamptons dreams and the other strictly working class with small, or maybe no dreams, maybe just trying to keep above water, Woody is able give him take a look at class society in contemporary post-crash America. And it ain’t pretty, even for the fallen of the one percent. Except Jasmine steadfastly refuses to believe there was any such thing as downward mobility in the world (downward mobility courtesy of a reckless wheeler-dealer husband played by Alex Baldwin who turns out to have been just another guy working the age-old Ponzi scheme and who also committed suicide in prison after she turned him in). And so she lives in her own little universe, keeps her own sense of self up  by berating Ginger and her obvious working class ethos (pizza and television sports, sex, hell, maybe even bowling) and by scheming to get back on top anyway she can. Unsuccessfully as the film ends, and end though where she is as befuddled by her life and its downward drift as when she started. And that may say more about Allen’s ability to do more than make stock figures out of his characters than what was possible to explore here. What you see this one for really is the performance by Cate Blanchett, and you should see that.