Kritiken

Blue Jasmine is a typical auteur film. Rich as it may seem when viewed in isolation, it looks much richer in the context of its creator's body of work... Jasmine is a strikingly Zelig-like figure, though her situation is far more tragic. If the ‘true' Zelig could not be revealed while he was imitating those around him, Jasmine will cease to exist if she stops acting... Whereas Zelig could fit in anywhere, Jasmine fits in nowhere.

A single close-up of Cate Blanchett – quietly intense, bleary-eyed, and halfway gone – dropped into an otherwise lighthearted dialogue scene twists Woody Allen's new movie from a familiar neurotic comedy into a much darker psychological horror film, a transformation it never returns from. Instead, the film, like a knife slowly entering one's torso, burrows deeper into the chasm of avarice and denial that is Blanchett's character...

While Allen's self-consciously contemporary film stays part-way lodged in the Great Depression, Blanchett's Jasmine gets one real, vital tremor of outrage that's near to an insight: "There's only so many traumas a person can withstand before they take to the streets and start screaming.

Though it works exceptionally well as the tale of a woman attempting to scheme her way back into the corporate jet set, Blue Jasmine should also be considered as the abstract projection of internal delirium and paranoia. It's a more penetrating and even harrowing experience if we accept that none of the characters we're seeing on screen are real. Except Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), that is.

While Blanchett does a tremendous job of making this largely insufferable woman's struggle for redefinition compelling, she can't quite reconcile the character's past and present behavior—the film's treatment of incipient mental illness, in particular, tends to be dramatically convenient rather than psychologically acute. Tennessee Williams can rest easy.

What Blue Jasmine lacks in imagination about its working-class characters—gentle dupes—it makes up for in contempt for the white-collar criminals spending their money. It's precisely this sense of contempt that makes Blue Jasmine a little more bracing than Allen's usual, even if it also marks a clear disconnect between Allen and his literary influence du jour [Tennessee Williams].

By finally and logically assimilating his own middle-brow version of Tennessee Williams, Woody Allen confirms the same cultural impulse that originally enabled him to make his own art acceptable as art by our lofty American standards through making it slightly European (that is, by borrowing elements from Bergman or Fellini, much as Wallis would periodically employ Anna Magnani).

If Blue Jasmine... were simply a study of an entitled socialite getting her comeuppance, it would be quite a dull bird. The film's real genius stems from its ability to survey different stages in Jasmine's descent toward madness, from denial to acceptance to isolation and back again.

Blue Jasmine is bad in ways that Allen's movies have been bad for at least two decades. It's too clearly enamored with well-to-do lifestyles to offer a meaningful critique of them. The psychological insights feel like hand-me-downs from other movies... [But] Blanchett, Hawkins, and Baldwin [imbue] their characters with confidence and charisma without making them sympathetic.

Blue Jasmine is the searching Allen of Another Woman and Alice, and Jasmine is almost the sort of scornful id that Judy Davis was so good at playing for him. But where Davis came at the comedy with bile and Mia Farrow in Alice with whimsy, Blanchett is going for something unstable but secret.

As much as Allen here dots his script with somewhat anachronistic cultural referents and situations, "Blue Jasmine" doesn't feel quite as out of time as many of his recent non-comedic films have. And while there are lapses here and there, particularly concerning the actual time frame of both the contemporary scenes and the flashbacks, Allen's cross-cutting construction is largely solid and engaging.

As the wife of a foiled Ponzi mastermind who's left her broke and alone, Blanchett commands the screen in an emotionally complex role that earns her only the barest wisp of sympathy... Minor echoes of Husbands And Wives and Another Woman aside, Blue Jasmine is genuinely unlike any other film Allen has made. How much of the Woodman's recent output passes that test?