If history is any indication, Cate Blanchett can expect an Oscar nomination for her leading role in Woody Allen’s new movie Blue Jasmine — and those four reasons are named Penélope Cruz, Dianne Wiest, Diane Keaton, and Mira Sorvino! We’re looking back at Woody’s winning habit of getting Oscar gold for his leading ladies.

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Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine” features a knock-down, drag-out performance by Cate Blanchett as an emotionally frayed housewife who, through a series of trying betrayals, is all washed up. The film itself doesn’t match Blanchett’s stunning commitment — which is a pity, because in various ways it is one of Allen’s more unusual works in years.

Jasmine (Blanchett) has come to live with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), in San Francisco for a temporary amount of time while she gets back on her feet. As we learn in flashback structure, Jasmine was previously married to an exorbitantly wealthy businessman, Hal (Alec Baldwin), living a life of elegant finery, before Hal’s fraudulent business schemes were found out by the FBI and he was sent to prison, leaving Jasmine and Hal’s now estranged son (Alden Ehrenreich) penniless.

Jasmine, a tall, regal blonde, and Ginger, a cute, pint-sized brunette, are adopted sisters, which explains their physical dissimilarities. Their class differences are explained by a turning point in their adolescences: Ginger was less liked by their adoptive mother, and ran away at an early age, eking out her own living.

In San Francisco, Ginger waffles back and forth between staying with her meathead fiance, Chili (Bobby Cannavale). And Jasmine must get a job and reluctantly takes a position in a dental office, as she harbors ambitions of becoming an interior decorator. She eventually meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a cultured diplomat living in the Bay Area, and through a few well-intentioned fibs that balloon into full-on lies, convinces him she’s a successful interior designer.

Oh, and one more thing: Jasmine is completely mentally unstable. Blanchett gives a ferociously unvarnished performance, deftly capturing the jittering, rambling, free-wheelingly self-absorbed fluctuations of an entitled woman on the verge — hell, in the midst — of a nervous breakdown. Jasmine’s M.O. is that she’ll begin a seemingly innocuous story — necessarily about her past life — that at a certain point will take a hairpin turn into the depths of her frittered subconscious.

She’ll be staring directly at her sister, but suddenly speaking to a Manhattan housewife she used to know, trembling and thrusting her voice into a low, lethal rumble. Like Blanche DuBois of “A Streetcar Named Desire” before her, she can move from lucidity to delusion at breakneck speed, sometimes within a scene, sometimes between scenes, a vertiginous pace that Blanchett keeps up believably.

The flashback structure of “Blue Jasmine” thus emerges both as a storytelling technique but also as a glitch in Jasmine’s ability to cope with the present. In that vein, this is a remarkably formally elegant film. Allen returns to cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, who gave “Vicky Christina Barcelona” its rich visual sense of warmth and intimacy.

“Blue Jasmine” also acts as a class critique, which is where the film falters. Allen knows the Manhattan upper-class scene like the back of his hand. The flashback sequences with Blanchett and Baldwin as beautiful socialites have a sharp, observant authenticity. The scenes set in present-day San Francisco, however, are oddly off.

Allen’s characterization of working-class people plays as mildly exploitative. Ginger’s first husband, Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), is a Jersey Boy type, while Cannavale as her current boyfriend Chili is a more hyperbolic, stereotypical version of Augie. Slicked hair, tight t-shirts, artificially tanned skin and New Yawkuh accents for both of these characters reveal a lack of imagination on Allen’s part but also a strangely off-kilter sense of place. Both Augie and Chili are coded as East Coast — uncultured meatheads played for laughs — yet they’re Bay Area residents.

Meanwhile, Ginger is a divorced single mother, and grocery bagger, living in a sprawling San Francisco apartment. No matter how often Jasmine glares down her nose at her sister’s supposedly squalid abode, we aren’t convinced that the bohemian-chic and spacious flat is the home of someone struggling to make ends meet.

These aspects ultimately seem careless in a film that in many ways is impressively dark and nuanced. In his later films, Allen struggles with supporting roles. A lead character — such as Blanchett here — is fleshed out, three-dimensional and often winningly rich with the signature neuroses and insecurities that Allen has made a lifelong obsession. Yet smaller characters are tossed off and inconsistent — both the talented Michael Stuhlbarg and Louis C.K. are given fairly thankless roles in the film — while observations about cultural environments have a tourist-like superficiality.

Blanchett’s wonderfully unwieldy character in “Blue Jasmine” has tasted the highs and lows of what life has to offer, and simmers with volatile frustration and pathos. I can’t help but share a bit of her frustration. Much of “Blue Jasmine” is very good — why must it be so uneven?

“Blue Jasmine” hits theaters July 26, via Sony Pictures Classics.

(Part 20, King Louis XVI of France) June 28, 2011 – 5:44 am

(Part 19,Marie Antoinette) June 27, 2011 – 12:16 am

(Part 18, Claude Monet) June 26, 2011 – 5:41 am

(Part 17, J. M. W. Turner) June 25, 2011 – 5:44 am

(Part 16, Josephine Baker) June 24, 2011 – 5:18 am

I have spent alot of time talking about Woody Allen films on this blog and looking at his worldview. He has a hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic worldview that believes we are going to turn to dust and there is no afterlife. Even though he has this view he has taken the opportunity to look at the weaknesses of […]

I have spent alot of time talking about Woody Allen films on this blog and looking at his worldview. He has a hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic worldview that believes we are going to turn to dust and there is no afterlife. Even though he has this view he has taken the opportunity to look at the weaknesses of […]

Woody Allen video interview in France Related posts: “Woody Wednesdays” Woody Allen on God and Death June 6, 2012 – 6:00 am Good website on Woody Allen How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter? If Jesus Christ came back today and […]

I have spent alot of time talking about Woody Allen films on this blog and looking at his worldview. He has a hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic worldview that believes we are going to turn to dust and there is no afterlife. Even though he has this view he has taken the opportunity to look at the weaknesses of […]

A surprisingly civil discussion between evangelical Billy Graham and agnostic comedian Woody Allen. Skip to 2:00 in the video to hear Graham discuss premarital sex, to 4:30 to hear him respond to Allen’s question about the worst sin and to 7:55 for the comparison between accepting Christ and taking LSD. ___________________ The Christian Post > […]

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I have spent alot of time talking about Woody Allen films on this blog and looking at his worldview. He has a hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic worldview that believes we are going to turn to dust and there is no afterlife. Even though he has this view he has taken the opportunity to look at the weaknesses of […]

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