Characteristically breezy but etched with anguish, Woody Allen’s new tragicomedy “Blue Jasmine” focuses on a fallen Manhattan socialite who, uprooted from her caste and sent into working class purgatory in San Francisco, is unequipped to adjust to a world of cramped apartments and working stiffs.
Having barely escaped the bonfire of the vanities, soignée widow Jasmine (early Oscar contender Cate Blanchett), as self-deluded as she is self-entitled, has landed in the frying pan of poverty. Her hubristic attempt to become the trophy wife of a Marin County political wannabe (smoothly played by Peter Sarsgaard) likens her to “The House of Mirth”’s Lily Bart; her journey into incipient madness suggests Blanche DuBois.
Not merely a character study, “Blue Jasmine” is a rueful commentary on the unbridgeable class divide in America, and Allen’s most trenchant film since “Match Point.” Although two intentionally bland middle-class characters show up: the dentist (Michael Stuhlberg) who hires Jasmine as a receptionist and farcically hits on her, and the married audio engineer (Louis C.K.) who has a fling with her checkout-clerk sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), Allen emphasizes the polarities between blue-collar struggle and new-moneyed sloth.
There’s no question where his sympathies lies. If he pokes fun at the guidos Ginger usually goes for, he also acknowledges their sincerity and work ethic. He is less sparing of the idle rich represented by Jasmine, whose expertise is in shopping and whose husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), dead at the start of the film, was a Ponzi Scheme operator of Madoffian proportions.
Allen remains a perceptive delineator of doomed neurotic women. In the spirit of both Dostoevsky and Hitchcock, he has had a few murdered — Dolores in “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Lillian in “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” Nola in “Match Point.” But his disintegrating women have been more resonant: Eve in “Interiors,” Dorrie in “Stardust Memories,” Maria Elena in “Vicky Christina Barcelona.”
A member of this latter group, Jasmine has made fatal choices. Allen’s deft integration of her backstory reveals how Hal plucked her out of college before she finished her anthropology degree and lavished her with gifts as his ill-gotten wealth grew.
Flashbacks depicting their opulent lifestyle show how he also routinely cheated on her with her friends, their trainer (“You’ll do fine,” he purrs, setting up a tryst), a lawyer, and a teenage au pair. The accent is not on his philandering and embezzling but on Jasmine’s willful blinkeredness and her haute arrogance — their Fifth Avenue apartment and Hamptons spread are her personal Tuileries and Versailles.
Along the way, Hal defrauds Ginger and her naïve husband, Augie (a sympathetic Andrew Dice Clay), out of the $200,000 he intended to invest in a contracting business. As a result, Ginger’s marriage has also ended, though she’s since fallen in love with Chili, whose hair-trigger temper masks a sensitive side.
Whereas Ginger’s own capacity for self-delusion, exemplified by her affair with the audio guy, is tempered by an ability to get back to reality, Jasmine can only retreat to the pathetic nostalgie of “Blue Moon,” her and Hal’s love song. Like Blanche, her only hope is the kindness of strangers, but where are they?