"Blue Jasmine" hadn't even started, and it already felt like a lie.
Lights go down. Electric curtain draws. Audience members rush to finish conversations. All standard operating procedure as the projector starts. Then the digital screen widens to scope. A Woody Allen movie not shot in flat? What is this, "Manhattan"?
Then, of course, the familiar white Windsor font set to jazz launches, which always grants me the immediate feeling that I made the right decision, and we're firmly back in Woody terrain. Still, that momentary jolt, that feeling that all is not what we assumed, rings appropriate for "Blue Jasmine," which barely contains a scene in which all characters have access to the exact same information. Most Allen movies transcend their times by speaking to some fundamental human natures; make a few minor modifications, and they coulda been shot in any year. "Blue Jasmine" is among his few, though, that feels completely, vitally now. When was the last time one of his movies even referenced current events, let alone required them for the plot?
When we first meet Jasmine (a luminously unbalanced Cate Blanchett), she's on a plane bound for San Francisco, chatting it up with the stranger next to her. Jasmine regales the new friend with stories of attending Boston University until she met her future husband Hal (Alec Baldwin, inhabiting like a glove the role of charismatic sleazeball). From then on, nothing but Park Avenue and the Hamptons and a life of privilege that makes one forget there's a world around you.
Only then the plane lands, and Jasmine is alone, conspicuously no husband to greet her. That woman who offered a friendly ear on the plane is now nothing more than a stranger standing at baggage claim with a wall of silence between them. As our heroine who flew first class and sports gargantuan sunglasses takes a cab to apparently move in with her working class sister (Sally Hawkins), suddenly that bit from the plane about her lush lifestyle seems less like a story she tells others and more like a story she tells herself.
And there, in a nutshell, arrives the core of "Blue Jasmine" - all the lies, both white and major, that we tell to get through parties, to get through dates, and just to get through our day. Almost everyone in this movie spins some kind of fiction, but it's rarely to hurt anyone else so much as to as to act out the reality we wish to be true. Here is a group of characters who heed to the end the immortal wisdom of George Costanza, "It's not a lie if you believe in it."
Lets put it another way. There's basically one character in this movie who's completely, morally upfront with everybody, and he's played by Andrew Dice Clay.
For a director almost entirely known for his work in New York, it's no accident that Allen moves the bulk of the action in "Blue Jasmine" to San Francisco. While NYC feels like a city where people jockey for space with the version of themselves they want you to see, San Francisco is more a place where you can let fly whatever flag you hold. It's a city where you can stop pretending and just exist. After suffering trauma in New York I won't describe here, Jasmine goes west, young man. But the movie's bicoastal irony is that Jasmine traveled 3000 miles to a city that doesn't care who you are, only to invent a version of herself that doesn't exist.
If "Blue Jasmine" is partially a study in how people respond to and sometimes require new environments (one key character must even travel to Alaska to survive), then it also demonstrates how our emotional hang-ups will ultimately overrule whatever opportunities those new places grant.
Especially admirable is how Allen trusts us to figure it out. My biggest
complaint about "Midnight In Paris" is its betrayal of one of the top
rules of writing: never, never tell the audience what they're supposed to think. Come the big monologue in that movie's Moulin Rouge sequence that explicitly says we shouldn't idolize the past, Allen lost me. Here, everything is told through behavior. Characters feel like they guide the plot, as opposed to the flip side, and when you have characters who unwaveringly refuse sympathy as much as these do, that's ballsy.
Now I was about to make a list of all the ways this isn't a typical Woody Allen movie. The aforementioned scope aspect ratio and the incorporation of current headlines. The comedy that plays less like one-liners and more like characters naturally behaving in their own element. An increased level of scorn for the elites coupled with, for Allen, unprecedented sympathy for the working class (although one of the movie's tenets that all the good guys are poor and all the bad guys are rich is a little too easy and sometimes kind of patronizing).
All this until I realized...is there a typical Woody Allen movie? How do you even define his immense body of work? Here is someone who, with rare exception, gives us a movie every year, like both a creative work and a sacrifice to the gods. "Annie Hall" might tower as the Woody Standard, but where does that leave "Crimes And Misdemeanors" or "The Purple Rose Of Cairo," two other classics? One thing that always inspires me in my favorite artists is a willingness to ignore what the public expects you to be and to just embrace who you are now.
Bitterness unites most of Allen's movies, but it's a sunny kind of bitterness, one that sees possibility in our inherent suckiness; isn't it kind of freeing to accept that there's little hope? More and more this decade, though, and especially in "Blue Jasmine," Allen allows that bitterness to creep to the foreground. He's older, closer to death (lets face it), and sees a human race that screws itself in a circle.
Look, I don't want to paint "Blue Jasmine" as dreary. I didn't leave it feeling depressed, and chances are you won't either. It's too casual for that, the structure too loose and like a hang-out. Instead, Allen drops us in a series of events happening today and says, "Here are people whose dishonesty sends happiness away. Some of them will learn and recover. Some of them won't. This is how it is."
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