Blue Jasmine // Movie Review

 

I slipped away for a few hours last week and saw the latest Woody Allen directed film Blue Jasmine.  I would not count this as a must see, except if you are a dedicated Allen fan.  This is not a comedy, though it does have plenty of comedic touches.  That it's a drama is not why I don't recommend it.  Allen can do serious material.  He is also under-appreciated as a visual director, I think, and his keen sense of composition and the taking in of majestic landscapes is on display here.  But it is the writing, the thing that he's best known for, that bogs the movie down. There is a certain out of touch quality to Blue Jasmine, derived I think from a combination of the writer-director's age and socio-economic class, that makes it feel like he's imagining what his working class characters must be like without actually having met any in real life.   They're sympathetic, but more than a little superficial in their rendering.

To put it in a nutshell; Cate Blanchett plays the title character; a woman married to a Bernie Madoff like swindler (Alec Baldwin).  She's living the high life in New York, willfully unaware of her husband's crooked business dealings and numerous marital infidelities.  Eventually he's found out, on both counts; needless to say they lose it all.   The husband goes to jail, eventually commits suicide, and the emotionally fragile Jasmine goes to live with her working class sister in San Francisco.  Both sisters were adopted, and there is this ongoing debate between them, which never seems to go anywhere, as to whether genes are responsible for the divergence in their social standings.  The story is told in flashbacks, and we see that Jasmine was emotionally brittle even before her fall from grace, and may be responsible, in part, for her predicament.

Allen makes about a movie a year and writes his own material.  This is a clear formula for plenty of hits and misses, and this is a miss.  I didn't catch last year's To Rome with Love, but did see Midnight in Paris, and liked it very much.  But even there, as with Blue Jasmine, I was aware the entire time that Woody Allen had written the dialogue.  He has this strange way of trying to sound natural that still comes off as mannered and contrived.  I find this less problematic with comedy, but with drama it seems to undercut the power of the performances.  And beyond the visuals, the strength of this film lies in the performances, especially by Blanchett and Baldwin.  Unfortunately they are made to deliver lines that I'm not sure real people would ever say, or at least not in the way they're formulated.  The big exception is one scene between Blanchett and Baldwin that I have a strange feeling is mirroring real life way more than the whole Madoff thing they have going on here. 

As I think I've said in other places, mediocre Woody Allen is still better than most film makers out there when they bring their "A Game."  So a reluctant pass on Blue Jasmine, but maybe wait for the DVD and catch it then.