MAX CASELLA, CATE BLANCHETT, SALLY HAWKINS AND BOBBY CARNAVALE IN BLUE JASMINE

Tangled web

Blue Jasmine is hard to describe. What is it? A depressing comedy? A serious film with some comic bits? Certainly it shows how dark Woody Allen's view of life has become at this point. He packs a lot of what he knows about filmmaking and scenario-writing into it, so in a sense it shows him at the top of his game (it would be just as good as a stage play). But he's changed the game. It's not a thriller and not a comedy, and it's hardly inspired by Bergman or his earlier "serious" inspirations. Since it's got Sally Hawkins of Happy-Go-Lucky, it makes you think of Mike Leigh: a busy family drama of domestic fights and individual meltdowns. Only it lacks Leigh's sense of society and of place. This time it adopts colorful San Francisco locations for backdrops that are flashy but superficial. It's full of flashback scenes set in a glitzy super-rich Manhattan lifestyle, with all the gloss he has liked in his later films, but not quite Woody's element either. Still, it's compulsive watching.

Packs is the word, because the sequences don't leave us much time to breathe. This is a disaster movie. Jasmine (Cate Blanchet, in one of her richest dramatic roles) is a stylish, crazy narcissistic monologist -- a splendid, troubling creation but also a brittle one. Flying in from New York, she shows up at the lower middle class San Francisco apartment of her adopted sister (she was adopted too, but had different birth parents), flying first class with Vuitton luggage, but out of money. She has good reason to be blue. She's already had a nervous breakdown and is headed toward a final meltdown. Her situation has become desperate and she is ill prepared to deal with it. Her rich husband Hal (Alec Baldwin, seen only in flashbacks) is a mini-Bernie Madoff and a philanderer. She comes to stay with her sister and must deal with her hotheaded handyman boyfriend, the aptly named Chili (Bobby Cannavale).

Ginger (Hawkins) has two noisy little boys, Matthew (Daniel Jenks) and Johnny (Max Rutherford). In one of my favorite scenes, Jasmine entertains them in a booth at a Chucky Cheese while Ginger has a hot date with "another man," because Jasmine thinks she can do much better than Chili, or her ex, Augie (Andrew Dice Clay). Jasmine talks to Matthew and Johnny like adults. It's a hilariously inappropriate monologue. And yet it's partly really addressed to them, as advice on what to do when they become super-rich. It's unlikely Woody has ever done a scene like this. It's unexpected and brilliant.

Not much really happens, and yet a lot. Jasmine takes a job as a dentist's receptionist referred to her by a friend of Chili's (Max Casella). Dr. Flicker (Michael Stuhlbarg) is smitten with Jasmine, but that's only an annoyance. She is taking a computer literacy course so she can get an online degree in decorating.

At a posh San Francisco party Ginger and Jasmine go to, they both meet men, both of whom they think is the answer to their dreams, Al (Louis C.K.), an installer of sound systems for Ginger, and Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard, creepily good), a wealthy State Department employee, for Jasmine. Neither works out, but Ginger has Chili to fall back on. Jasmine has nothing. She tries to reconnect with her grown son, Danny (Alden Ehrenreich), who had to drop out of Harvard due to the scandal about his father and now is married and sells used musical instruments in Marin. But he cannot forgive Jasmine for ratting on his dad: evil and duplicitous though Hal was, turning him in to the FBI seems worse. So he cuts off his mother. For her, it's the end of the line. All along she has munched bottles full of pills (Xanax especially) and gulped Stoli martinis, and these anodynes no longer work. She was once found screaming and raving on the street in New York, and it's going to start again.

Really Blue Jasmine is a character study. Many of the scenes are shrill and theatrical. Woody's depiction of working class men is crude, Bobby Carnavale slick and ugly at the same time, and the less bright, unambitious Ginger is just a modest coper. Jasmine, on the other hand, is grandiose and enigmatic. Where did her glitzy life come from? She dropped out of college to marry Hal and has no skills. Yet she played the game well for years. Now it's over. She's a little like a Tennessee Williams character: in fact this is a homage to A Steetcar Named Desire. Jasmine is also, almost, a ritzy Willy Loman with nothing left to sell: there's a classic bitter, tragic American theatrical sensibility here. Blue Jasmine also has some sense of America's post-2008 Great Recession. Lots of fantasies came crashing down after that. The flashbacks woven in and out of the present San Francisco scenes, which in themselves are only half real, are the portrait of a psyche. Did they really happen? The collections of Bentleys, the houses in the Hamptons, the boat rides on the French Riviera? Woody Allen almost seems to be mocking his own fantasies. He's just a Jewish boy who did great standup and could write like S. J. Perelman. And then he began making movies, and he ended up with this. As Denby said in his New Yorker review, this is written in a "curt and decisive" manner, "a 'late' style, if there ever was one."

What this "curt" manner means is that Blue Jasmine lacks the resonance of Tennessee Williams' play. It's fascinating to watch Cate Blanchett act the hell out of her role; she doesn't really chew the scenery any more than the lines make her do, though she probably could have injected both more tragedy and more comedy if she were a great actress. She is, however, clearly a technically very fine one. As Armond White says, though, her character is "singularly obnoxious" and "blocks our empathy." Her greatest achievement is to seem not really to be present. It's only in those few fleeting moments when Jasmine's attention wanders off into space that she's touching. And since there's not much to Ginger, even though Sally Hawkins is appealing (and also technically terrific), there's nobody finally to care about. This is a tangled web -- of charlatans and losers. Not like late Shakespeare at all.

Blue Jasmine, 98 mins., opened in NYC July 26, 2013, Aug. 2 in some other locations. Metacritic rating: 78%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.