Cate Blanchett, the leading lady in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine.
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While in college, she met the budding financier Hal (Alec Baldwin) and soared on his Wall Street bubble to the apogee of New York City glamour. Then Hal's kingdom imploded in felonious scandal, as Bernie Madoff's did. Jasmine, suddenly poor, is obliged to take refuge in the cramped Bay Area apartment that her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) lives in. Ginger's blue collar ex Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) is still steamed that Hal aced him out of a lottery fortune, so Jasmine's visit promises friction between her and her sister and, crucially, between the real world and the far rosier one she created.
Jasmine, you see, is really Jeanette; she and Ginger were the adopted daughters in a middle-class family. When she met Hal, she reinvented herself to appeal to him. Then she lost her husband, her home, her status and possibly one or two of her marbles--everything but her will to sustain her elegant fantasy.
The character is, pretty obviously, Allen's version of Tennessee Williams' Blanche DuBois, who in A Streetcar Named Desire went to stay with sister Stella and that sexy brute Stanley Kowalski. Onstage, in her native Australia and in America, Blanchett played a magnificently shattered Blanche. Here, she paints all the shades of a blue Jasmine.
Melbourne-born Catherine Elise Blanchett, 44, was a sensation right out of drama school, playing Shakespeare's Ophelia and Miranda. At the Sydney Theatre Company, run by her husband, playwright-director Andrew Upton, she has won acclaim in world-touring revivals of Streetcar, Hedda Gabler and Uncle Vanya. In her spare time, she's an incandescent, indispensable movie star. She has incarnated the 16th century monarch Elizabeth I in two lavish biopics--earning a pair of Academy Award nominations--and the elf princess Galadriel in the Tolkien films, four and counting. She snagged an Oscar as the aristocratic Katharine Hepburn opposite the Howard Hughes of Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. But this regal actress is available for roles other than queens and movie queens. In an astonishing sex switch in I'm Not There, she managed an utterly persuasive impersonation of Bob Dylan.
Blanchett's new character has some of the icy star quality of her Dylan. The difference is that few people in San Francisco are buying Jasmine's act. While Hawkins' Ginger is perky and funny, accepting her romantic and economic hard knocks with a smile, Jasmine takes every disappointment as a harbinger of tragedy. In San Francisco she gets a job as the receptionist for a dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) who makes a clumsy play for her; she responds as if he were a rapist. Her last hope is the genial, wealthy Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), who loves the fantasy Jasmine. Will he love the fallen Jeanette?