The new Woody Allen film Blue Jasmine is worth seeing for the performance of actress Cate Blanchett, who plays Jasmine, a woman struggling to keep her sanity after a steep, sudden fall from wealth and privilege. Her husband was a financial con man (a la Bernie Madoff) who was exposed and sent to prison thanks in part to her character's dropping a dime on him to the FBI in a fit of rage after learning of his multiple affairs. She's now poor at the beginning of the film, and flies to San Francisco to live with her blue collar sister and that sister's two young sons. Blanchett is a great physical presence. She depicts the emotions and crumbling of her life while desperately trying to hold on to that life.
Aside from Blanchett's performance, the film is marred by a number of flaws in the script and the story line. Everyone, including Blanchett's character, is out of central casting. She and her friends in Manhattan, from her good days (we see them in flashbacks), are one-dimensional types. The same is true for her husband, played by Alec Baldwin, a financial con artist, and her sister's boy friend, a car mechanic.
The logical fallacies of the film bothered me. Blanchett is flying first class in the opening scene, though we never discover where she got the money to do so -- she's supposed to be so destitute that she has to get a job working in a dentist's office. Jasmine's sister, a grocery clerk in San Francisco, lives in a spacious apartment (it's big enough to offer Jasmine a room) filled with furniture and tasteful decorations that don't seem related to a grocery clerk's salary. There are a number of such holes in the film and story line. The biggest problem is that I never believed the formerly rich and smooth Jasmine was in any way related to her blue collar sister -- these two don't seem as if they ever grew up in the same house together. That Jasmine would fly across the country, in her time of need, to get a job as a dental office secretary and live with this sister stretches credulity. This and other problems gives the film a concocted feel.
I read elsewhere that the story line is related to Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. This is correct only in a vague way. Yes, Jasmine and Blanche Duboit have both taken steep falls, but the resemblance ends with that. Blanche dwells on her past glory, while Jasmine actively works to re-acquire the life she once new, and she's willing to lie her way there.
