Blue Jasmine

In a year filled with movies about the have-more culture, Woody Allen has laid bare how the upper half lives. Cate Blanchett is magnificent in “Blue Jasmine,” Allen’s dramatic “Streetcar named Desire” inspired portrait of a crumbling woman amidst infidelity, deceit and blissful ignorance.

I wrote recently about “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” how women in movies tend to keep their composure better than men when faced with a personal crisis, and Jasmine has this down flat. Jasmine is the ever so prim and proper housewife of Hal (Alec Baldwin), an obscenely wealthy businessman and trader who turns out to be a massive crook. She’s been driven out of her home to live with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) after Hal is arrested, and yet that complication doesn’t stop her from carefully micromanaging her life story such that she can stay in her protective bubble of wealth and stature.

Jeanette is Jasmine’s real name, but the floral connotation had a better narrative. She met Hal while “Blue Moon” played, but then even this appears to be a clever fabrication. Now she aspires to be an interior designer with a license she can obtain if she only figures out how to use “computers.” This will be perfect as it allows her to continue to adorn herself in glamour and luxury without having any inherent skills. Heaven forbid she bag groceries like her sister.

Jasmine is so narcissistic that she never earns the audience’s sympathy. She describes Hal’s suicide in prison with sadistic relish. It’s not strangulation that kills you when you’re hung, she explains; the rope snaps your neck.

Her self-destructive role rather is to add a hint of parody, show the dramatic extent of such a consumed personality and provide a culture clash contrast to her poverty-stricken sister, who is the real heart of the film.

Ginger broke up with her first husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) after they invested with Hal and lost everything as well, and now she’s starting over with Chili (Bobby Cannavale) a spicy mechanic who does not earn the favor of Jasmine. To see Jasmine’s allure and powerful influence over Ginger’s relationship is a social commentary about the economic divide in itself, but it’s also a wonderful emotional tool that compounds itself when Ginger meets a “nice guy” played by Louis C.K.

Through C.K.’s character and Jasmine’s flirtation with another male pocketbook played by Peter Sarsgaard, Allen shows us the two sides of the rich-poor mentality. One woman will forever accept the love and items she thinks she deserves and be stronger for it, and the other will strive for the finest things in life and be spoiled and obsessed in the process.

It’s some of Allen’s finest character construction in years, and leaps and bounds more serious than his two foreign vacation fantasies, the delightful “Midnight in Paris” and the disappointingly silly “To Rome with Love.”

And yet this is Blanchett’s movie through and through. One could write a thesis paper on how Blanchett manipulates her hair during conversation, maintains constant poise and her liberal love of Stoli vodka. Watch the life drain from her face with such contempt and loathsomeness as Chili and his friend Eddie dare to ask her questions on her level. It’s pure exasperation, and Blanchett’s crazed, split personality performance carries her through the guarded, polite dialogue in flashback scenes with Hal and fiery breakdowns in front of Chili. She’s absolutely stunning.

“Blue Jasmine” plays so much like its title character. It’s fascinating, charismatic and perfectly poised, but it strips away the surface layers to find something truly shocking and wild.

4 stars