Blue Jasmine (2013)

I have been watching Woody Allen films for over 40 years, and there are very few of them that at the end of the day do I feel like I don't entirely get.  Perhaps it is the homage films that I struggle with.  'Interiors', Allen's homage to Ingmar Bergman, was the last Allen movie that when it ended I said, "What?".  This is rumored to be done in the Tennessee Williams style of story telling, which as near as I can tell is a talented portrayal of misery that has no meaning and the characters lack an ability to escape it.

Cate Blanchett is eminently watchable in the lead role of Jasmine.  Her character is one of the best film portrayals of a narcissist in recent years--she is elegant and self centered on the outside, with a fragile core.  Her porcelain exterior is cracked and she does not know how to gat back to the the pinnacle that she was so abruptly shoved off off.


Jamine's rich and successful husband is prosecuted for fraud.  He goes to jail, they get divorced and she loses everything.  It turns out that she had more than a little to do with her fate, but in any case, she goes off to live with her sister, aptly played by Sally Hawkins.  They are both adopted, and while we do not meet the parents, that story alone just didn't ring true--I could easily beleive that they were biological sisters separated at birth and raised in different families, but the opposite just seemed too far fetched, and I had a great deal of trouble letting go of that disbelief.  If you can get around that, Cate Blanchett portrays Jasmine with the right balance of pathos and shallowness that everyone can think of someone that she reminds them of.