Blue Jasmine: Troubling and Troubled

I went to see Blue Jasmine with a friend last night, knowing only the barest outlines of the plot—wealthy New York socialite falls on hard times, moves to San Francisco to live with her sister—and expecting one of those whimsical and/or wistful fables or fairy tales Woody Allen has made, leavened with a least a little of the jumpy, frantic (Jewish) humor for which he is so famous.

It was nothing of the sort., Cate Blanchett plays Jasmine, the wife of a New York investment operator named Hal (Alex Baldwin) whose illegal schemes have bought all the trappings of Upper East Side affluence—sumptuous Park Avenue apartment, summer home in the Hamptons, Ivy League school for the kid, and a lot of trinkets for the wife. Hal is busted and jailed, and Jasmine—the trappings now pulled out from beneath her, the wealth now confiscated by the government—comes down in the world to live with her middle-brow sister, Ginger, and her two kids in a San Francisco flat.

More than half way through the movie I was sure I had decided I didn’t like it. Quite possibly it is because of my expectations for something lighter, but I actually found much of it painful to watch. A contemporary take on A Streetcar Named Desire (transparently so I realize now, though I learned it only later after reading reviews; Tennessee Williams was not a favorite of mine), there is a jangly, nerve-racking sense of impending catastrophe in many of the scenes, or of violence, a sense that someone is going to get hit. Like Blanche in Streetcar, Jasmine’s pretensions only thinly mask her alcoholism and incipient mental illness, and there is something menacing and dangerous in her disintegration. Ginger’s boyfriend, Chili, seems a sure bet to be a woman-beater when he learns that Ginger has a fling with a man she meets at a party to which she accompanies Jasmine; in fact, he doesn’t hit her (though he does rip a phone out of a wall), and shows up at the grocery store where she works weeping for her to come back to him. Among the victims of Hal’s swindles is Ginger’s ex-husband Augie (played remarkably by—who would ever guess?—Andrew Dice Clay). His loss feels especially unjust and lastingly hurtful; “cruel” is the word my companion found for much of the havoc that happens in this film. Cruel, painful, and menacing, and the humor is sparse.   

But I find myself 24 hours later thinking about it a lot, a sure sign that the movie has worked its bizarre spell—it is a strange movie—on me. Somewhere still early in the movie Jasmine says her name is for the flower that is known to bloom in the darkness---and you think hopefully, why yes, of course, this will be a sweet story after all; Jasmine will blossom to new life in a dark and difficult time. But more sinister implications are still to come and now I wonder if in fact her statement isn’t meant more literally: hers is a spirit that lives in, thrives on, darkness, shadows, untruth, that dislikes the light. There is something weirdly dissonant about the film. It’s a dark story, with little happiness and a lot of pain, but it is shot almost entirely in the promise-filled California sunshine, the opulent light of upper-East Side affluence, or the sunlit privilege of the Hamptons. We learn that Hal kills himself in prison, hangs himself with a rope. Jasmine informs her sister and Chili (and us) that in hanging a person is killed not by strangulation, but because the noose snaps and breaks the neck. She says it twice, insistently. At the time, it seems sad and rueful, but now I wonder if she doesn’t mean it vengefully, a cruelly violent pay-back not for robbing his victims of their money, but for robbing Jasmine of the life she believed was her birthright. Her own untruth with regard to the past torpedoes what might have been a promising new romance in California, and a deft and surprising plot twist near the end lets us know that she may have been more complicit, or at least less oblivious to, the illicit nature of her of her husband’s business than she has all along been pleading.

I wonder if Woody Allen isn’t working around a bleak statement about the inability of people to change, to move out of the trajectory that their chemistry or their character has determined for them. Jasmine and Ginger were both adopted, born of different mothers, and Ginger more than once states that Jasmine “got the good genes.” But “you can’t always blame it on genes,” Jasmine retorts, insisting that people can change direction with willpower, hard work, determination, that they do not have to be who they seem destined to be.

And San Francisco is famously a place where people go to start over—not just in the old school sense of going back to school, starting a new career, starting from scratch, but in the New Age sense of taking on a new identity, adopting a new lifestyle, becoming a different kind of person. It is, in the imagination of many, a place you might go to become that offbeat, un-conforming, uncompromising, interesting person you always thought you would become.  At heart I think most mature people know that this is for the most part, a fairy tale. But it is one we grant ourselves and others license to believe because….well, because, why not? Life is short and why not give it a try?Besides, there is evidence that it can happen.

But Jasmine the movie seems to be telling us, brutally, cruelly, that it can’t. You take yourself with you wherever you go, and Shakespeare’s dictum—character is destiny—seems coldly dominant. A vain, shallow New York socialite whose recklessness with the truth wreaks havoc wherever she goes, will be a vain, shallow and reckless West Coaster struggling to get to the next paycheck.

Cate Blanchett gives an awesome portrayal of disintegration, but she seems to me in retrospect to be just simply unreal. Certainly, the world is full of vain and shallow people, filled with untruth, and conceivably the cossetted 1 percent who inhabit the Upper East Side and summer in the Hamptons have a higher proportion of such types. And the complicity, silent or otherwise, of wives in the white collar crimes of the rich and powerful is a most interesting topic. But could any real person be as vapidly oblivious to the contemporary world (she doesn’t know how to use the Internet? really?) and at the same time as bottomlessly shallow in her aspirations (nice jewelry seems to be enough to get her to believe, or ignore, anything)? She lies luxuriating in a bubble bath in the Park Avenue condo when her husband treats her to the latest bauble, a glittery bracelet; this feels more like a caricature of the way wealthy criminals buy off their wives, but Jasmine coos and fawns over it like a child. Her out-of-touch-ness with reality seems less a reflection of real mental illness afflicting a real person, than the fact that she herself is not real, a phantasm of the writer’s imagination deposited into a world of real people who feel real pain. Woody Allen has given us a dissonant, difficult, thought provoking and troubling story, but one that I can’t help feeling is also somehow troubled, if not exactly flawed.