The Queen Stands Alone

Call her Jasmine, as in the night-blooming flower. Tall and chic, with cheekbones that deserve a Keatsian ode, she could be the apotheosis or cartoon of the urban sophisticate. When she orders her “Stoli martini with a twist of lemon” in the throaty voice that Tom Wolfe described as the “New York Social Baritone,” she cows everyone in sight and likes it that way. On the phone, she is not above asking, “Can you just put someone on who speaks better English?” This odd goddess, displaced from haute Manhattan to working-class San Francisco, can be as annoying as she is alluring. But fascination triumphs because, in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, she is played by Cate Blanchett.

Woody Allen films are thought to be defined by the author’s voice–whiny, cutting, querulous and, of course, male–from his ’60s stand-up routines and his early comedies. But Allen, who as writer, director and often star has averaged a movie a year since his auteur debut with Take the Money and Run in 1969, quickly matured to make films that can’t easily be pegged as comedies or dramas; any of his pictures may owe as much to Ingmar Bergman as to Billy Wilder. “This is the guy who directed Bananas and Interiors,” Blanchett notes, “so, in terms of tone, the field is wide open.” And in terms of voice, his most memorable ones are often female.

Following the dictum “write what you know,” Allen observed the women he lived with and loved, and he turned his take on their personalities into film fiction. Diane Keaton’s warm, slightly addled cheerfulness gave a fresh ’70s bounce to Love and Death and Annie Hall. Mia Farrow, his long-term wife equivalent, anchored Allen’s ’80s films as a wispy creature with heroic resources. The knowing intimacy of these movies allowed the viewer to think they were snapshots of Woody and his women, just in costume and with the names changed. That inference helped stoke the shock of the revelation, in 1992, that Allen had left Farrow to take up with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi. (They are still together, in Allen’s longest romantic relationship.)

O.K., so the heart wants what it wants. But putting aside the dime-store psychologizing to look at the actual work, anyone could acknowledge that Allen, at 77, is America’s premier writer-director of women’s films. In an age when Hollywood focuses on superheroes and bromances, he has probed the slow-roiling tensions in a clan of sisters (Interiors, Hannah and Her Sisters); constructed roundelays of infidelity (Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors), with the sympathy going to the females; and analyzed pained women in crisis (Alice, Melinda and Melinda).

For gracing his films, actresses have earned five Oscars and 11 nominations. Blanchett should be on that track with Jasmine–one of Allen’s most troubled and troubling women.

While in college, she met the budding financier Hal (Alec Baldwin) and soared on his Wall Street bubble to the apogee of New York City glamour. Then Hal’s kingdom imploded in felonious scandal, as Bernie Madoff’s did. Jasmine, suddenly poor, is obliged to take refuge in the cramped Bay Area apartment that her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) lives in. Ginger’s blue collar ex Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) is still steamed that Hal aced him out of a lottery fortune, so Jasmine’s visit promises friction between her and her sister and, crucially, between the real world and the far rosier one she created.

Jasmine, you see, is really Jeanette; she and Ginger were the adopted daughters in a middle-class family. When she met Hal, she reinvented herself to appeal to him. Then she lost her husband, her home, her status and possibly one or two of her marbles–everything but her will to sustain her elegant fantasy.

The character is, pretty obviously, Allen’s version of Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, who in A Streetcar Named Desire went to stay with sister Stella and that sexy brute Stanley Kowalski. Onstage, in her native Australia and in America, Blanchett played a magnificently shattered Blanche. Here, she paints all the shades of a blue Jasmine.

Melbourne-born Catherine Elise Blanchett, 44, was a sensation right out of drama school, playing Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Miranda. At the Sydney Theatre Company, run by her husband, playwright-director Andrew Upton, she has won acclaim in world-touring revivals of Streetcar, Hedda Gabler and Uncle Vanya. In her spare time, she’s an incandescent, indispensable movie star. She has incarnated the 16th century monarch Elizabeth I in two lavish biopics–earning a pair of Academy Award nominations–and the elf princess Galadriel in the Tolkien films, four and counting. She snagged an Oscar as the aristocratic Katharine Hepburn opposite the Howard Hughes of Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. But this regal actress is available for roles other than queens and movie queens. In an astonishing sex switch in I’m Not There, she managed an utterly persuasive impersonation of Bob Dylan.

Blanchett’s new character has some of the icy star quality of her Dylan. The difference is that few people in San Francisco are buying Jasmine’s act. While Hawkins’ Ginger is perky and funny, accepting her romantic and economic hard knocks with a smile, Jasmine takes every disappointment as a harbinger of tragedy. In San Francisco she gets a job as the receptionist for a dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) who makes a clumsy play for her; she responds as if he were a rapist. Her last hope is the genial, wealthy Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), who loves the fantasy Jasmine. Will he love the fallen Jeanette?

In the Allen Gallery of women, some of the portraits have been one-dimensional–the cutie, the harridan, the wise or worldly-wise older woman–as if Allen were putting his ladies either on a pedestal or under it. Jasmine is more complex or contradictory: a mix of Farrow’s lost dreamer in The Purple Rose of Cairo and the acerbic women played by Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry. Whereas Allen allowed Scarlett Johansson to breathe her allure into her Match Point role and let Penélope Cruz seize Vicky Cristina Barcelona by the gonads, he has Blanchett play Jasmine as a woman of haughty privilege, primed for a comeuppance.

Blanchett believes that sentimentalizing Jasmine would diminish her. “It’s frankly more interesting,” she says, “to keep a distance from the part you’re playing. You can be at arm’s length but still compassionate.” She was also attracted to the “classic elements” of Jasmine: “the delusion and the evasion, and who she perceives she is trumping who she actually is. It’s very pleasant to choose fantasy, but there lies madness.”

Legend has it that Allen is aloof from his actors. Blanchett thinks that’s a myth. “I found him forthcoming, generous and refreshingly honest,” she says. “It can be brutal when people are honest, but I much prefer to know if it’s not working, because you can do something with that–rather than people who go, ‘Oh, we’ll fix it up in post.’ There is no post on a Woody Allen film. If it doesn’t happen then, it doesn’t happen at all.”

In the case of Blue Jasmine, it’s the great Cate who makes it happen.