About half of Woody Allen’s movies are pure and simple masterpieces. The other half are movies that I feel would have never been made if Woody Allen’s name wasn’t attached to them. Blue Jasmine falls clearly into the vanity project category. The all star cast does a good job of being angry and desperate, with Cate Blanchett doing the bulk of the heavy lifting acting insane and looking shell shocked. Maybe my lack of affection for Blue Jasmine has to do with my expectations from Woody Allen, I expected humor and at the very least some people I might care about.
Blue Jasmine reminded me of HBO’s Enlightened, a show about a tall pretty blonde woman who lives in a world of her own creation and doesn’t care if she destroys everyone else’s world along the way. Blue Jasmine is the story of a woman who has fallen from the heights of New York’s Fifth Avenue Society to a crappy neighborhood in San Francisco. She has no money and no skills and is insulted when it’s suggested that she might get a job as a receptionist. Even though she has to live with her grocery store clerk sister, she still had matching Louis Vuitton luggage and designer everything from shoes to bags to scarfs. She won’t even entertain the idea of selling these items.
Our hero Jasmine is nuts and spends a good deal of time talking to herself, reliving the moments that brought her to this lowly place and listening to songs only she can hear. The twist in the tale wasn’t all that surprising and the ending left us wondering what might happen next, but not really caring.
The film looked good, Woody Allen does his usual amazing job of direction and brings in close for horror stricken faces and leaves us out at sea for a beautiful view of the Bay. The bulk of the film is inner-cut flashbacks from the glory days when she was married to a billionaire Bernard Madoff type played to sleazy perfection by Alec Baldwin and her current life of abject hopelessness surrounded by working class people she can only see as white trash unworthy of her time or attention. There were way too many of these flashbacks and flashforwards for my taste, especially since the flashbacks were thin slices that felt like they were in random order.
Like so many serious art house type movies, the blatant message in Blue Jasmine is Life Sucks and Keeps on Sucking. Blue Jasmine was a downer, but it wasn’t a tearjerker, I didn’t give a damn about any of these people. Woody Allen did a great job of creating a bunch of unlikable people getting exactly what they deserve and making it a completely unsatisfying experience.
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