Title: Blue Jasmine

Directed by: Woody Allen

Starring: Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Bobby Cannavale, Sally Hawkins

Grade: B-

After two movies set in Europe, Woody Allen takes viewers back stateside in his new film, “Blue Jasmine.” Once there, we are invited to watch Cate Blanchett drown her sorrows in anti-anxiety medication and Stoli while living in her sister’s crummy apartment in San Francisco. And boy, are viewers supposed to feel bad for her.

Or are they?

One of the most interesting things about Allen’s latest movie is that it’s difficult to tell how exactly you’re supposed to perceive Blanchett’s character, Jasmine. She’s every stereotype about Upper-East-Side bourgeois made manifest. Too stupid to realize that her husband — Alec Baldwin’s smooth-talking Hal — is making his millions through a Ponzi scheme, she sips martinis overlooking the beach, in part willfully ignorant of Hal’s shady dealings, but also partly clueless to their significance. 

The few snippets of Hal explaining to his son the moral benefits of altruism serve as an ironic contrast not only to his thieving Ponzi scheme, but also to the fact that his wife is more concerned with saving face than giving her lower-middle-class sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), the time of day. 

The importance that Jasmine places on her reputation — which she is horrified of tarnishing — is most obvious when Ginger comes to New York City to visit. Jasmine can’t really understand why Ginger isn’t satisfied with the lavish itinerary she has lined up for her sister. Ginger wants her sister to show her around and take her shopping, and although the richer half of the duo finally consents, she frowns the whole way through. Ginger’s glee and wonder so strongly irk Jasmine that it’s clear she can’t understand or relate to anyone who isn’t already a part of her opulent little world.

When the roof inevitably comes falling down on her life, Jasmine becomes the socialite-turned-pauper that defines her on-screen character for the vast majority of the film. This essentially makes “Blue Jasmine” a movie about loss and dealing with picking up the pieces after some sort of calamity. And that’s all fine and good — but themes like that don’t really reek of late-career Allen, whose dilemmas can be happily resolved by tying a happy little bow on the ending.

In fact, this movie seems very much like an early-career Allen and carries all the existential neuroses that come along with the territory. It shows the fragility of stability and how easy it is to lose everything. It’s also an exploration of what to do when you’re at the bottom, what to do when you meet the bottom-dwellers that reside there and how to accept yourself when you become one.

Jasmine gets a crash course in all those things. 

Although she may sound endearing at times, it is often hard to pity Jasmine. She would rather devote her time and energy to finding a wealthy man to spoil her than pulling herself up by her bootstraps, so to speak. She’s whiny, neurotic, chiding and condescending. Allen has embodied all these traits in characters he, himself, has portrayed during his career, but at least he was awkwardly adorable in doing so.

Blanchett just isn’t adorable. From the get-go, she’s so perfectly over the top that it’s ludicrous to look at her the same way that you would Ginger, for example, who has spent her life working hard and trying to find happiness with a suitable partner. Jasmine’s character is so well-written and so well-played that you can’t really swallow what may seem like an attempt to spoon-feed you prepackaged pity. 

And that’s exactly the point.

You don’t feel bad for Jasmine’s inability to live among the proletariat. Instead — and this is one of the most genius parts of the film — the audience feels bad with her. “Blue Jasmine” makes viewers understand the difference between empathy and sympathy, a requisite for fully appreciating the film. You should empathize with Jasmine because you should know what it’s like to feel like you’re above your conditions and that you’ve been dragged through the dirt by rotten luck. But you shouldn’t feel sympathy for her, because while she’s on the ground, she’s a flat out crazy..

Seeing “Blue Jasmine” should produce some sort of conversation about the very real duality between pity and understanding, and that’s a pretty Allen-esque concept. Jasmine’s character is tragic, but she’s not a tragic hero.

What becomes problematic, however, is the movie’s accessibility. The dichotomy that exists between what you should feel and what you should not feel is pretty complicated, and the lines are easily blurred. You want to pat Jasmine on the back and encourage her one moment, and then tell her to shut her cavalier mouth the next. Her character demands a humanistic conceptualizing that doesn’t just plop her into two rigidly divided camps. 

It is possible to like her. It is possible to hate her. And it’s possible to fall right in the middle. And there’s a good chance that the last one is exactly what Allen was aiming for.