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I never knew before seeing Blue Jasmine<\/em> that so many people in San Francisco talk as though they lived in Bensonhurst all their lives. Nor, for that matter, did I know there was anyone under the age of, say, 50, who at this point in our history needed to go to something called \u201ccomputer school\u201d as a step towards taking on-line interior decorating courses. Then again, I bet I could tell Woody Allen a lot of things he doesn\u2019t seem to know from watching his latest movie; for instance, that living in Brooklyn these days isn\u2019t such a comedown from living in Manhattan. I mean, has he even noticed what a two-bedroom-one-bath apartment now goes for in Park Slope? Or even Bed-Stuy?<\/p>\n I\u2019m aware that I now sound like all the knee-jerk Woody bashers who love finding fault with everything he does, inflating their contrarian capital off a reputation that hasn\u2019t been nearly as impregnable as it was in 1979. What I mostly find admirable about Woody Allen these days (and it\u2019s no small thing) is his tenacity in stepping up to the plate every other year just to see if he connects — and how far he can take the ball, whether the critics or the public like it or not. Don\u2019t like that metaphor? How about the old saw of throwing a pile of you-know-what against the wall to see what shape it makes? However you look at it, this is what Allen chooses to do with his life now and if what sometimes results from his habit can be as satisfying as Vicky Cristina Barcelona<\/em> or as haphazardly diverting as Midnight in Paris,<\/em> then I\u2019m thinking there are far less salutary ways for a 77-year-old man to spend his time.<\/p>\n Blue Jasmine<\/em> has been wildly hailed, even by a few habitual Woody bashers, as being one of his best. I wanted to agree, partly because I prefer to cheer Allen on, but mostly because of what\u2019s been proclaimed the movie\u2019s principal asset: Cate Blanchett, playing a lapsed socialite driven to a slow-motion breakdown by the fiscal and marital cheating of her ponzi-scheming husband (Alec Baldwin)., Blanchett borrows much of the Day-Glo manic intensity she brought to her legendary stage rendition of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire<\/em> to make her Jasmine a moist, quivering tower of jolting mood swings and ruined dignity. You stare at her face the same way you can be hypnotized by a wall-sized relief map of the world. All that\u2019s familiar about her is every bit as exotic and mysterious as the places you didn\u2019t know existed. Though she\u2019s more formidable a physical presence than anybody else on-screen, Jasmine still teeters on the edge of sanity like a china figurine on the ledge of a shelf. You just want to be able to keep her from shattering when a fresh trauma jostles the ground beneath her.<\/p>\n It was only after the movie was over and she\u2019d succeeded in breaking down my emotional defenses that I began to wonder whether Blanchett\u2019s virtuosity amounted to a thinking-person\u2019s special effect; something to \u201cooh\u201d and \u201caah\u201d over as you\u2019re watching it block out the relatively threadbare thinking that went into the rest of the movie. Once Blanchett\u2019s spell had dissipated, I even began to wonder how clever it really was for Allen\u2019s movie to crib from the Tennessee Williams playbook to evoke the present-day reverb from the post-Millennial bust. It may flatter the professional and amateur spectators in the house to notice how Chili (Bobby Cannavalle), the earthy, volatile fianc\u00e9e of Jasmine\u2019s sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) does or, mostly, doesn\u2019t resemble Blanche\u2019s b\u00eate-noire Stanley Kowalski. But that\u2019s a lot different from responding to him as a human being. Even when he\u2019s crying, Chili\u2019s more a narrative device than a person. And this in turn places every other character\u2019s humanity, even Jasmine\u2019s, in doubt.<\/p>\n I\u2019m willing to entertain the possibility that the artificiality of Allen\u2019s tactics may be his point; that crises make us all, either wittingly or not, helpless characters in melodramas scripted by somebody else. However awkward or unearned the San Francisco milieu seems here (even the creepy-crawly dentist Jasmine fends off seems like someone whose office would more likely be based on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights), it\u2019s drawn out Allen\u2019s better technical instincts. His cameras get more moodiness out of Ginger\u2019s cluttered apartment than a less-experienced filmmaker would have dared. But the discordances in the storytelling, including the ones cited at the start of this piece, detract from such graces. I\u2019m still not sure what to make of Jasmine\u2019s harrowing rant in front of Ginger\u2019s children beyond being another occasion to be riveted by the chromatic map of Cate Blanchett\u2019s face. I\u2019m mesmerized by the spectacle while wondering what it\u2019s doing there at that moment.<\/p>\n There’s another performance in Blue Jasmine<\/em> that\u2019s just as transformative, maybe more so, than Blanchett\u2019s. It belongs to Andrew Dice Clay as Ginger\u2019s ex-husband Augie, whose marriage and life fell apart from investing his own modest fortune into a ponzi scheme. In his relatively few scenes, Clay conveys all the conflicting emotions of helplessness, bewilderment and unfocused rage common among those of us living in the aftermath of the burst economic bubble. I never thought I\u2019d say this about anything to do with Clay, but I would pay to see a whole movie about that guy and I could even imagine Woody Allen making it \u2013 that is, if he could burst through his own bubble and see how the world beyond the East End and the Upper East Side truly lives now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I never knew before seeing Blue Jasmine that so many people in San Francisco talk as though they lived in Bensonhurst all their lives. Nor, for that matter, did I know there was anyone under the age of, say, 50, who at this point in our history needed to go to something called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[322,323,321,318,317,319,316,320,315],"class_list":["post-839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-alec-baldwin","tag-andrew-dice-clay","tag-bensonhurst","tag-blanche-dubois","tag-blue-jasmine","tag-bobby-cannavalle","tag-cate-blanchett","tag-sally-hawkins","tag-woody-allen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":849,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions\/849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}