BLUE JASMINE

Woody Allen is a national treasure. When his films work, they're as beautiful, funny and insightful as anything out there. It's absolutely incredible that he's managed to write and direct at least one film per year since 1982. But that frenetic pace also means we must accept a certain amount of unevenness to his work as proven by his latest film Blue Jasmine.

The film centers around a pair of adopted sisters forced together after years of estrangement. Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) married rich but looses everything when her husband (Alec Baldwin) is arrested for some Bernie Madoff-esque wrong doing. She is taken in by Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who lives in a poor, San Fransisco neighborhood with her two kids from a failed marriage to Augie (a well used Andrew Dice Clay).

Allen's attempt to difine the sisters through class distinctions, not to mention their relationships, is often insufferably shallow and repetitive. We get scene after scene of Jasmine being impossibly snooty and constantly embarrassed by her sisters poverty, while Ginger chews gum and carries on in her dislocated Jersey Shore accent. Allen's use of stereotypes is never as grating as it was in Whatever Works, but we could probably have done without Ginger's hotheaded, Italian fiance who's mostly there to rip the occasional phone off the wall. Also, take a shot every time he reminds us that Jasmine's husband was "a real crook who ripped everyone off" and that "she probably knew all about it!"

What Jasmine knew and when she knew is a central question here. It's clear that she's very aloof and has lived most of her life in denial, but at some point her denial becomes unreasonable. At any rate it's clear that she's trying hard to downplay her past to everyone she meets, particularly with a perspective boyfriend she meets at a party.  Her clumsy, comically circuitous attempts at reinvention are some of the best parts of the film, particularly a sequence where she takes a class in computers. Allen is a self-confessed technophobe and one imagines him paying the computer literate neighbor boy from down the hall five bucks to write a block of jargon for the film.

The film does try and add dimension to Jasmine's character by explaining that all the stress has induced some kind of ongoing mental breakdown. As a script device, it's clumsy and melodramatic. Poor Blanchett is forced to wave her secret pills at the screen in the most vaudevillian way possible, but strangely she makes the character work. As Jasmine's reinventions and deceptions unravel, we're left with a sense of just how much emotional damage she's done to herself and her family. It's touching and it's all Blanchett. The script Allen has written for her is bland, pedestrian and cliche but she saves it, in moments even elevates it, but like so many of Allen's films, it often feels like we're watching a first draft.

Grade: C+