Blanchett is brilliant as Woody Allen’s broken socialite
‘Combustible cocktail of rage and fear’ in Blue Jasmine
NEW YORK When Cate Blanchett was last in New York, in between her nightly performances in the acclaimed touring production of Uncle Vanya, she would slip uptown, to the East Side, to stealthily research her role in Woody Allen’s latest, Blue Jasmine.
In it, Blanchett plays Jasmine, a socialite in breakdown, a modern Blanche DuBois (a role Blanchett played a few years ago on stage, the “detritus” of which she says stays with her), distraught and destroyed by the betrayal of her Bernie Madoff-like financier husband (Alec Baldwin). On Jasmine’s stomping ground, the Upper East Side, Blanchett bent her ear to the neighbourhood’s accents of affluence.
“I drank way too much wine sitting in restaurants by myself,” says Blanchett, today sitting in a midtown office in a sleeveless emerald-green top and skirt.
The polished refinement, though, is only a small element — a surface that cracks — to Blanchett’s enormously layered performance in Blue Jasmine.
Her Jasmine is, as she says, “a fragile, combustible cocktail of rage and guilt and fear.” Penniless in San Francisco, where she’s forced to stay at the working- class home of her sister (Sally Hawkins), Jasmine is a vodka-swilling, Xanax-popping mess of self-loathing, denial and panic.
Like many of the 44-year-old actress’s best performances, including her Oscar-nominated turn as Elizabeth I in 1998’s Elizabeth, Jasmine is a mix of ruthlessness (she’s brutal to those she considers inferior) and quaking vulnerability. The performance has been called a lock for an Academy Award nomination, which would be her sixth.
The role’s complexity is partly in the film’s A-Streetcar-Named-Desire structure, toggling back and forth between before the downfall (in New York and the Hamptons) and after (San Francisco). Blanchett carefully charted Jasmine’s unravelling across the flashbacks: “You don’t want to flat line,” she says. Jasmine is thus many people, radiantly elegant for some (Peter Sarsgaard, as a moneyed suitor) and condescendingly bitter to others (Bobby Cannavale, as her sister’s blue-collar boyfriend).
“People talk about actors pretending, but you watch people and a certain person walks into a room, that person who’s speaking to you one minute completely changes,” says Blanchett. “We’re constantly morphing into different outward manifestations of ourselves. That’s what I find curious about people. It’s just that as Jasmine progresses through the story and her situation becomes increasingly desperate, those social identities become increasingly fractured and they’re not able to be a cohesive, functioning person.”