dvd of the week
In Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen has provided Cate Blanchett, arguably the greatest actress of her generation, her greatest role – a woman destroyed by her own pretensions. The film’s comedy is in the nervous discomfort of class warfare, the clueless vapidity of the rich and capitalistic. It is Allen going to San Francisco to shred New York’s myopic cruelty, both for our amusement and as guilt-free schadenfreude. We giggle, but Jasmine herself is not a comic character, and the lives both she and her sister Ginger lead are not comic. Blanchett’s Jasmine is both reprehensible and sympathetic, while Sally Hawkins’ Ginger is sweet, understanding, and as comfortable in her own skin and her lot in life as Jasmine is not with her own. Blanchett is so good and so flashy in her excellence that it’s easy to not notice how good Hawkins is, too. And it’s also easy not to notice how great, how sly and smart and scathing, Allen’s screenplay is.
