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"  Woody Allen&amp;#039;s Blue Jasmine starts aboard a flight from New York City to San Francisco, with an older woman getting an earful from her chic but anxious seatmate, a total stranger. Played by an Oscar-worthy Cate Blanchett in classic Chanel with an Herm\u00E8s scarf and bag, Jasmine is a shallow pseudo-socialite whose world has come apart\u2014and so, it appears, has she. She breathlessly spills the intimacies and agonies of a broken marriage, a horrific financial crack-up, and (gasp!) a d\u00E9class\u00E9 sister whom she has mostly ignored but who didn&amp;#039;t hesitate to take her in when it seems that no one else would dream of doing so. One of the greatest actors of our day, Blanchett knows just what to do with Jasmine, a disturbed and disturbing woman of seemingly endless facets that occasionally charm but more often collide in shocking or darkly comic ways. Watching her is like looking in a fun-house mirror, one just familiar enough to make you feel a panicky kinship with that well-dressed mess behind the glass. Fortunately, we&amp;#039;re not alone. Allen&amp;#039;s casts are one of his signature treats. Often a mingling of new talent and seasoned pros, his actors reward him with performances we couldn&amp;#039;t have imagined, as in Midnight in Paris, with Kathy Bates&amp;#039; pitch-perfect Gertrude Stein and the adorable Rachel McAdams as such a horrid shrew you want to dump her into the Seine. This time around, the British megastar Sally Hawkins plays Ginger, Jasmine&amp;#039;s grocery-cashier sister, with an impressively sassy American accent. The versatile Bobby Cannavale is Ginger&amp;#039;s exuberant, roughneck fianc\u00E9, and, most amazingly, Peter Sarsgaard becomes Jasmine&amp;#039;s impulsive suitor, an old-money scion and do-good diplomat who walks around with a silver spoon sticking out of his mouth while nonstop lies pour forth from hers. Allen also has fun throwing us curveballs with the other men in Ginger&amp;#039;s life: Louis C.K. as a seductive, aw-shucks deceiver, and a wholly convincing Andrew Dice Clay as her decent, hardworking ex-husband. Blue Jasmine is an audacious, sure-footed leap for Allen, who, at 77, makes it look easy. He gives us the absurdist human comedy we expect from him\u2014but at the same time something weird and scary is going on underneath. Blanchett&amp;#039;s Jasmine is both the axis of the movie and its destabilizer. Is she really going off the rails, or just missing her ex&amp;#039;s dough? The most important of the secondary characters is Jasmine&amp;#039;s former husband, Hal, played as smooth as an oil slick by Alec Baldwin. This is Baldwin&amp;#039;s third time in an Allen film, which makes him something of a muse. In the playful, pixilated Alice (1990), he&amp;#039;s a gentle, sexy ghost, Alice&amp;#039;s long-dead first lover, who-appears in order to give her the courage to flee her trap of a marriage; he&amp;#039;s equally appealing in To Rome With Love, as a wistful, lovelorn architect who may or may not be real. Hal is certainly real, but his sweet talk isn&amp;#039;t. With his polo ponies and dicey hedge-fund operations, he stands in nicely for our plague of twenty-first-century robber barons. Allen shows us the good life Hal and Jasmine enjoyed in a series of flashbacks, luxurious but impeccably tasteful\u2014no nouveau-riche vulgarity here to be mocked, yet their world is somehow unappealing. Then it hits you: There&amp;#039;s not a speck of genuine human warmth, no tenderness or compassion, much less love. The movie&amp;#039;s shifts back and forth between Jasmine&amp;#039;s recent past and dire present are so skillful that instead of disrupting the narrative, they deepen it. And Allen is too honest to sprinkle salt-of-the-earth sentimentality on Ginger&amp;#039;s world. When her fianc\u00E9 discovers her infidelity, he storms out, smashing things as he goes, while you pray that he doesn&amp;#039;t smash her. This is Woody Allen&amp;#039;s forty-eighth movie, and it has a powerful stringency that makes it one of his very best. I never thought I&amp;#039;d compare Allen to Anthony Trollope. But there it is\u2014the great Victorian novelist&amp;#039;s gimlet-eyed masterpiece whose rich swindler is Melmotte, the Bernie Madoff of 1875. Blue Jasmine is a more poetic title, but Trollope&amp;#039;s would have worked just fine: The Way We Live Now. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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