Blue Jasmine – An Overrated Woody Allen Film (Spoiler’s Alert)

I love Woody Allen, as a director, a comedian, and a writer. I love Cate Blanchett, as an actress, a fashionista, and a queen. I love Alec Baldwin, as an actor, a comedian, and a Jack Donaghy. You would think that the three put together renders magic, but instead it shows you sloppiness.

Maybe this was an experiment, maybe it was some new form of art called irrational, or maybe this is mere sloppiness and bad choreographing. This film marks the low for Mr. Allen’s career and is highly… overrated.

The movie starts off with a disturbing conversation that would bore you out within the first 20 seconds if you have seen a film before – just a film in general. A chirping, delirious woman who would not stop talking about her past relationship. You know what that would entail - a 100 minute excerpt of her life that causes your cerebral cortex to feel compassionate, gripped, and say "what another Woody Allen film".

The plot moves on with Jasmine at the door of Ginger's - the once haughty, wealthy socialite who lived a sumptuous life at the door of her blue-collar sister's. The plot tries to tell us the information that they were both adopted, which is completely useless information just to make us believe that they are sisters. After a short flashback to Jasmine's past wealth, we sees Ginger with her ex, Augie, and two kids. We could immediately sense that she is also a money-loving woman with a bit of hostility, which makes no sense because the story later tells us that she takes in her broke and shattered sister out of goodwill, despite Jasmine's snobby remark on her life in the past. 

We also learn that Ginger and her ex lost all their money years ago because of Jasmine and her husband Hal who cajoled them into an investment that turned out to be complete fraud. This happened while the separate couple were still together, they toured New York with the luxurious limo that Hal appointed. On their tour, Ginger spotted Hal kissing another woman and later decided to let Jasmine know. Jasmine was surprisingly rather indifferent as we learned that Hal had been a philandering womanizer the entire time.

The plot goes back to the two sisters in blue collar world in San Francisco. Ginger is dating Chili, a Italian stereotype that's seen in almost every Woody Allen film. Following is Hal flirting with other women, which at this point, only slows down the pace of the film with no substantial reason behind it. It doesn't even serve to better describe Hal's character. But this problem is obvious throughout the entire film so we will get back to it.

You know where the plot is going now - she kept being the self-absorbed, self-pitying wicked woman that fails to get my compassion. She finds work at a dentist 's and apparently everyone falls in love with this pill-popping lady who is definitely 45 years old already. He harasses her and she is unemployed once again. She and Ginger went to a party and each of them is very willing to cheat or lie to get a man. Ginger is attracted to a married man and later gets ditched. Jasmine is almost engaged to a wannabe congressman through lying (note: this is a politician) and met  Augie when picking the stone and eventually exposed as deceptive and vain. 

Now we need to come back to how this film bothers me and messes with my curiosity. All the characters, including Jasmine, was not fully developed. The film is almost made up of screenshots of a person's life without any transitions in between and it happens that all the bits and pieces are worst possible choice. The film could have gone in depth from any angle - further decadent of a once wealthy lady, more thrill to create a mental illness tension, drawing attention to adultery, clash between different classes. But Woody Allen skirted around each of them and later decided "meh, let's just talk about a couple days in a crazy woman's life and use all the actors I can think of in it". No one in the film was fully developed for the audience to care for them, and how the movie ended with a back to day one open ending made the story even more meaningless.

This film is not a comedy or a drama. It is an overrated film based on a badly written script.