New Release Review: 'Blue Jasmine'

I don't get Woody Allen. I feel I should say that upfront. I've never found his comedies terribly funny or his dramas particularly dramatic. His awkward and nebbish delivery - or that of his leading men doing their best impression of him - is fine for a couple of minutes but gets trying over a couple of hours. Fortunately his nervous patter has calmed somewhat over the years and even when he lets his anxieties run wild in halting monologues, delivered by leads that are created from the same recipe he's been using for years (intellectual job + stutter + bon mots), it's rather less irksome when delivered by a woman, as it is in Blue Jasmine (and in Vicky Cristina Barcelona).*

Cate Blanchett plays Jasmine, a New York socialite whose husband (Alec Baldwin) is arrested after perpetrating a massive financial fraud of the Bernie Madoff variety. Jasmine loses everything and has to move in with her adopted sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who lives in a cluttered apartment in San Francisco. Jasmine is desperate to return to her pampered lifestyle, and she does what she can to get it back, but her tenuous grasp on reality has a habit of getting in the way. Easily the best thing about Blue Jasmine is watching Blanchett hold her head high despite (as she sees it) the demeaning circumstances she now finds herself in. She's completely believable as the slowly unravelling, entitled Manhattanite, and I don't think she's ever been better. Even when the story lost me - which happened bang on the halfway mark - Blanchett didn't.

The problem with Blue Jasmine is that it has nothing to say. Nothing really happens and no one really changes. Which is about as close to a theme as Allen comes. All the characters are in stasis, unwavering and unchanging. Plenty of good and bad happens to both the sisters - they rarely deserve the good (such as a lottery win for Ginger and a wealthy husband for Jasmine) and they mostly don't deserve the bad (their entire world pulled out from under them). Life just happens. That's the main point of the film: life happens to you, whoever you are. You didn't deserve it and you probably won't learn from it. It's a bleak and simplistic point of view.

That Allen hasn't learnt anything as a director doesn't help. He made his first film back in 1966 and there's little to distinguish what he was doing then, to what he's doing now.

My advice would be to watch Blue Jasmine as part of a double bill with Richard Curtis's About Time. That way you can follow Allen's relentless pessimism with Curtis's relentless optimism, and come out a mostly balanced human being.

Overall: 6.5/10

*I'd argue that his mannerisms are less pronounced when women 'play' him, but it's equally possible that I'm just more tolerant of a beautiful woman being hyper-verbal and nervous than I am Allen (or one of his surrogates).