Blue Jasmine (***1/2)

Another year, another Woody Allen film. Following 2012’s forgettable To Rome with Love, Allen has returned to America but found another new (for him) locale, San Francisco. Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), formerly Jeanette, formerly of Manhattan, formerly wed to a wealthy businessman (Alec Baldwin), has headed west to live with her very different sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins). When we first meet her, she’s bending the ear of her airplane seatmate in the baggage checkout area. She’s a narcissist who talks a lot, talks to herself when no one else is available, and presents numerous scenery-chewing opportunities for Blanchett, who’s in all but a few scenes. She’s often funny. Hawkins, whose breakthrough role in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky got her a well-deserved Oscar nomination, has the less showy (and slightly smaller) role, but is a worthy counterbalance/foil for Jasmine.

Ginger herself is a mostly happy-go-lucky despite having lost money, and perhaps her ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), in an investment scheme facilitated by Jasmine’s former husband, whose financial machinations are depicted in several flashbacks featuring Baldwin.

Woody Allen has made a lot of films about wealthy people, and a few about working class people, but the class themes in this movie, a source of some of both the comedy and the drama, are unusual for him. Issues of class, parental favoritism and sibling rivalry are mostly under the surface, but they, and Ginger/Hawkins, are what elevate Blue Jasmine above airier trifles like Midnight in Paris. Whether or not you root for the suddenly destitute Jasmine, whose husband left her with only the sense of her own superiority, to resurrect herself, you’ll empathize with Ginger.

The male characters —notably Clay as the ex and Bobby Carnavale as Ginger’s mechanic boyfriend — are both thinner (unidimensional) and broader (less subtle), but Carnavale  provokes a couple of the bigger laughs. Another unusual feature (for Allen) is that there are actually children in the film. These are also small roles, but the deadpan/bewildered looks of Ginger’s two preteen boys as Jasmine tries to explain the virtues of electroshock therapy and the importance of tipping well are nearly worth the price of admission.

This is more than the best film Andrew Dice Clay has ever appeared in; of Allen’s, it’s easily the best since Vicky Cristina Barcelona, five films ago, more substantial than Midnight in Paris while maintaining that film’s mainstream appeal. Maybe one day he will even discover the existence of music written after the 1930s.

IMDb link

viewed 8/6/13 7:30 pm [PFS screening]; posted 8/9/13