Weekend Movies: Stormy Cate Takes 'Blue Jasmine'

 
Cate Blanchett self-medicates in the funny/tragic "Blue Jasmine" 

BY NATHANIEL ROGERS 

Cate Blanchett can't shut up in BLUE JASMINE, Woody Allen's latest dramedy which added more cities this weekend for its platform rollout. We join Jasmine (real name "Jeanette") in medias res on a flight to San Francisco as she's chattering away with, no, at an older companion. She goes on and on (and on some more!) about her love affair with her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) all the way through to baggage claim.

But Jasmine is a liar or at least a half truth-teller. We will immediately discover that her great love affair ended in ruin. Hal was a criminal, a financial con artist who pampered Jasmine with other people's fortunes and ruined everyone including Jasmine. She's moving in with her estranged adopted sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), also ruined by Hal's crimes, now that she's destitute. Jasmine hasn't adjusted to her new facts, though, treating her cabbie from the airport like a personal chauffeur, and leaving him a big tip considering she's supposed to be penniless.Jasmine isn't always "in the now" as it were. She never is actually, talking or bragging or obsessing over the past.

MORE AFTER THE JUMP...

When she's not downing xanax like breath mints she's dreaming of the future which looks suspiciously like the past with socioeconomic status restored and rich husband (albeit a new one) to care for her. Once Jasmine is living with Ginger, and bristling at her sister's low class digs (pretty spacious and nice for a check-out girl's salary!) and her unsophisticated boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale), the mashup of A Streetcar Named Desire and the Bernie Madoff scandal becomes apparent.

Woody is a smart enough screenwriter to avoid direct this equals that correlations, though. A Streetcar Named Desire is untouchable and the basic template is a solid enough melody to riff jazzily on. Cannavale, for instance, has the "Stanley Kowalski" macho-crybaby role minus the danger. The "Mitch" role has a few suitors but none of them ever quite work. As for Blanchett's own "Blanche", well Jasmine's fall is less innocent and poetic but she's no less of a mess than that Southern Belle once she hits bottom.

If your protagonist is going to babble incessantly for 98 minutes --as Jasmine does, to herself and to others -- you can't do much better than casting Cate Blanchett. Her voice has always been her greatest asset as a star actress, full of affect, sure (and that suits Jasmine who is always putting on airs), but melodious and extremely flexible to character. Her chords can hit you with delicate tremors of feeling or tectonic shifts in tone that level whole scenes.The cacophony of her chatter peaks with hilariously inappropriate life-lessons for her dumbfounded nephews:

"There's only so much trauma a person can withstand before they take to the streets and start screaming."

But the most inspired beat in her angry self-pitying performance may well be a silent one. [Spoiler Alert] While shopping with her new boyfriend Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), Jasmine is confronted by a figure from her past who exposes her myriad lies and mentions her son Danny (Alden Ehrenreich) whom she has conveniently denied existed. Blanchett goes dead silent for a moment in the space where she'd usually be lying, lost not in the humiliation of exposure -- she doesn't even seem to register Dwight's outrage --but shocked into temporary bracing present tense reality. [/Spoiler]

Blue Jasmine is fleet and vivid at 98 minutes and funny, too, despite its tragic nature. Yet it's also in some ineffable way kind of blurry, a half success which never quite comes into focus or shakes off its duller sideshow impulses. It hasn't worked out what to do with Ginger, underusing the excellent Sally Hawkins by saddling her with both reductive Hollywood tropes (As in Titanic and many other films "the poor" are exotically adaptable creatures, freer and happier than the upper-classes) and with a half-hearted subplot with Louis CK that never truly connects to the movie. The pressing question the movie fails to answer: If Ginger is a convenience and crutch for Jasmine, what exactly is Jasmine to Ginger? Hannah and Her Sisters is probably untoppable in this regard but couldn't the sibling relationships be clearer? 

The problem may be that the movie has ceded all of itself to Hurricane Blanchett who doesn't share the scenes so much as spin madly at their center (less a flaw of performance than the nature of Jasmine's psychology). Just days later it's difficult to recall individual moments, not because they're repetitive (less a flaw of filmmaking than the nature of Jasmine's psychology) but because the past keeps intruding on the present and entirely overwhelming it.

In some troubling way, Blue Jasmine begins as a bastard progeny of Streetcar but morphs into a sour sibling of Midnight in Paris. Woody Allen, like Jasmine, may well be lost in conversation with himself now. Gil in Midnight in Paris managed to see delusional nostalgia for the trap it is and wrestle free, but Jasmine (and maybe Woody?) is weaker, less aware of her own culpability in her ruts and troubles. In the merciless finale, Jasmine only sees the past leaving little hope that she has any kind of future.

ALSO PLAYING
The Spectacular Now proves that not all YA novels are supernatural! The screen adaptation of the romantic drama about a high school senior (Miles Teller) who really loves his girls (Shailene Woodley and Brie Larson) and his booze (and not in that order) is well acted and charming. The Wolverine is another grimly sober superhero flick (shouldn't having super powers be more fun?) that wastes its Japanese setting and its rare female cast [Reviewed]. And Fruitvale Station continues on its probable march towards Oscar nominations [Reviewed] though now it has Blue Jasmine for company in that conversation.

Nathaniel Rogers would live in the movie theater but for the poor internet reception. He blogs daily at the Film Experience. Follow him on Twitter @nathanielr.

Ryan Gosling's Lost Prison Strip Scene: VIDEO

Those of you with Ryan Gosling prison fantasies will be mighty pleased with a deleted scene from The Place Beyond the Pines making the rounds.

Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...

Gay Couple Ordered to the Back of the Bus for Holding Hands: VIDEO

Ron McCoy and his partner, Chris Bowers, a gay couple who had just flown in from Portland, Oregon for Albuquerque, New Mexico's Pride Festival last month, received a horrible welcome to the city from a driver on an airport shuttle bus, KRQE reports:

McCoy said he and his partner sat in the front of a shuttle bus, holding hands when a driver discriminated against them.

“I saw him look at us, look down at his hands and he looked so angry,” McCoy said. “He just blurted out at me, he goes, “'Okay, if you're going to do that, you're going to the back of the bus.'"

Shocked and not wanting to cause problems, the couple obeyed. Once the shuttle stopped at its destination, however, the couple asked the driver why he forced them to move.

“I said, ‘I think it was because you didn't like the fact that I was holding my partner's hand.' He goes, ‘See, now you're telling on yourself.’ My partner responds, 'Well, that's discrimination,' and the driver responds, ‘You're telling on yourself again,’” McCoy said.

A woman, originally from Albuquerque, witnessed the confrontation and jumped in. “I told the bus driver that I was completely appalled that anybody would be treated this way,” said Bernadette Aguirre.

“And the driver looks back at us and goes, 'I'll show you what's appalling,' and he points to us,” McCoy said.

Watch KRQE's report, AFTER THE JUMP...

Gay couple forced to back of bus

Gay Olympians Blake Skjellerup and Johnny Weir Speak Out on CNN Against Sochi Boycott: VIDEO

Speed skater Blake Skjellerup and figure skater Johnny Weir are in agreement that a boycott of the Sochi 2014 Games over Russia's inhumane treatment of gay people is a bad idea and speak out about how the presence of openly gay athletes at the Games may send a more powerful message.

Check out their conversation, AFTER THE JUMP...

Sicily's Openly Gay Governor Rosario Crocetta Tackles the Mafia

Rosario Crocetta, the gay governor of Sicily elected in October 2012, is winning support for taking on the mafia as he did as mayor of the small coastal town where he is from, and gets a nice profile in the Washington Post:

Since winning the governor’s job nine months ago, Crocetta has taken his crusade island-wide, kicking a hornet’s nest as he strengthens anti-mafia laws and takes aim at the cronyism, waste and corruption that turned Sicily’s treasury into the gift that kept giving. But to get this far, the 62-year-old former Communist with a penchant for sea-blue spectacles first had to tackle another powerful adversary: masculine stereotypes in Italy’s macho south.

“I’m homosexual, which I call a gift from God, and no, I didn’t hide it one bit!” he said, dangling a lit Marlboro and rearing his head back in a raucous laugh. Talking about his successful campaign for governor, he said, “the fact that I’m here is almost inconceivable. Even I’m surprised.”

To put it in perspective:

“Having Crocetta in Sicily is like having an openly gay man elected governor in Alabama,” said Ivan Scalfarotto, a member of the national parliament and a Milan-based gay rights advocate. “But the most telling point is that his sexuality became a small detail for voters. This was about what he had done” against the mafia.

Gay Olympian Matthew Mitcham: Russian Persecution 'Horrific'

Olympian champion diver Matthew Mitcham has weighed in on the controversy over gay athletes and the Sochi 2014 Games. the Daily Telegraph reports:

"It's really sad. The way they are persecuting people in Russia is quite horrific...The Olympics is the best experience you will ever have as an athlete. Their whole memory and experience is going to be marred by this stuff. They are going to be made to feel unacceptable, inappropriate, and it is a really awful, awful feeling. The Olympics are supposed to be somewhere where they can go to be relieved of that feeling. A place where you can compete and feel that gender and sexuality is not an issue."