“Blue Jasmine”
Directed by Woody Allem
Starring Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Sally Hawkins, Andrew Dice Clay, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C.K., Peter Skarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg
Drama
98 Mins
PG-13

In the aftermath of Blue Jasmine, the thing that people will be talking about most is Cate Blanchett‘s performance – a role for which she is assured an Oscar nomination. But while Blanchett is busy giving her powerhouse turn as titular Jasmine, Mr. Woody Allen is in the back corner shamelessly plagiarizing. This accusation rings true as the characters, beats, themes, and plots are pulled straight from the pages of Tennessee William‘s A Streetcar Named Desire. Those unfamiliar with the iconic play – or the Marlon Brando film – will be more willing to engage with the material on different terms but Allen’s project seems to have been the result of a little too much glancing at his neighbor’s work and we can’t help but mark him down for it. This fact does not, however, take away from the considerable work from Blanchett’s corner.

Playing an uppity socialite, Blanchett harnesses the manic hysterics of a character crippled by her own snobbish worldviews. Even though Allen has not put himself in front of the camera for much of his recent work, we all know that Allen still remains on the screen – just in another form. As Midnight in Paris injected star Owen Wilson with a more whimsical and charmed version of Allen, Blanchett’s Jasmine is Allen’s neurosis and angst cranked up until the dials break. She is a self-critical, self-loathing masochist, bottled up and shaken until she can’t help but pop, lashing at the the world around her just for existing.

Throughout her life, Jasmine is a woman who has come to define herself by her wealth so when her investment scourge husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), is sent to jail and stripped of his fortune, Jasmine not only loses a husband, but more importantly, her affluence. In her eyes, she may as well have been executed. Jasmine has spent her life building up this ideologies of herself, formulating a persona who is “engaging” and “attractive” even though she would be hard pressed to understand these terms outside of a dictionary. She’s a fake, a phony and her entire bio is a blatant fabrication. Even her name is contrived – having changed it from Jeannette to the more perfumed and “elegant” Jasmine in order to become a more eligible bachelorette.

Her impending “poverty” (which is still accompanied by custom Louis Vuitton luggage) inspires her to exile herself from New York, an alternative superior to becoming a high-class saleswoman, which in her mind is the equivalent of some lower-class social pariah – a bug to be stepped on. So Jasmine flees New York for San Francisco to the one person who will take her: her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins).

From minks and jewels to a pullout couch at her sister’s place, Jasmine keeps her hoity-toity superiority in tow even in the midst of her existential crisis. Even scraping rock bottom, Jasmine keeps her veneer, refusing help from anyone, but we can see the shallow act for what it is. Jasmine is a mirror for the one-percenters, a shell of wealth that begs questions of self-sufficiency in a patriarchal pyramid of more, more, more. To communicate this idea, Allen ratchets up his iconic neurosis to a paralyzing degree and Blanchett is crippled by her inability to cope “without”. As Batman is the symbol of justice, she is the iconoclast and definitive “crazy, rich bitch”.

When not dressing down those around her, she’s chattering away to herself. From the very first scene, Blanchett is revealed to be unhinging, blabbering on and on to what seems like a close friend but turns out to be a unfortunate neighbor. We wonder if Jasmine is Allen’s ironic, self-critical hand at work – mocking his own wealth and manic compulsions – or if he’s trying to unhinge an international pathos: a continuum where greed begets greed and wealth is an object of desire in and of itself.

While Allen’s intent here is more unclear than it is in most of his other work, this fact may be explained by the fact that this is also his most heavily borrowed film. The themes, characters, and tone are pulled straight from A Streetcar Named Desire making this one of Allen’s few films utterly ineligible for the screenwriting nod, which his work has become so accustomed to. While there is no inherent problem with building on, or borrowing from, themes from other works, Blue Jasmine is so directly congruent to William’s play that entire characters and relationships feel more plagiarized than reinvented.

You pity sister Ginger, whose life is hijacked by Jasmine’s overbearing presence and disillusioned megalomania, much like you pity Stella. Ginger sees herself as inferior to Jasmine – a relationship that her crooked, older sibling fights to preserve – and so excuses Jasmine’s selfish behavior while letting her own life hit the fan. Poor Ginger and ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) were even duped by Hal to invest their life savings in his Ponzi-scheming dealings. It’s the loss of this nest-egg that leads to their eventual divorce and yet Ginger goes on defending her elder sister.

Another character torn right from the book of Steetcar is Chili (Bobby Cannavale). You already know him as he is Brando’s Stanley down to his wife-beater tank-top, lower-class European roots, and penchant for sudden violent outbursts. It’s a wonder that he doesn’t belt out, “Ginger!!!!” in the middle of a dark night but a scene in the grocery store where Ginger works is a close equivalent as he’s publicly begging her forgiveness.

Continuing down the checklist, Jasmine’s romantic interests further the parallels to Streetcar. Like Blanche before her, Jasmine is an attractive, if past her prime, woman so she earns the attention of the local townspeople. None, however, are up to her lofty standards. On a few occasions, she mutters to herself, repeating her character’s important through-line – that she’s looking for “something substantial.” While she never fleshes out what exactly she means by this, her battling with romantic inadequacies only serve to fulfill the ideology that “something substantial” only comes in the form of wealth. When she meets a politician-in-the-making with the trappings of old-money in Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), she sees a way out in much the same way that Blanche does in Mitch. Regardless of the swooning character differences, both barrel towards the same inevitable conclusion.

Even though the film delivers some full-bellied laughs and is anchored by Blanchett’s knock-em-dead performance, it feels too borrowed to herald as “the return” to Allen’s heights. There’s no denying that Allen is aware of the many resemblances to William’s work but he fails to deviate far enough from the path to make this anything more than minor Woody. It’s worth watching, especially if you’re unfamiliar with William’s work as this definitely serves as an ample introduction, but it won’t change the stratosphere. If you are trying to discover early Oscar-nominated performances in their theatrical run though, be sure to catch this as Blanchett is nothing less than a shoe-in.