Quendrith Johnson

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

When the mantle is passed, Hollywood usually makes a show of it. Consider Julia Roberts' crown going to Anne Hathaway, or Katharine Hepburn grudgingly making way for Meryl Streep. With Woody Allen's late career opus, Blue Jasmine, the mantle has just passed from Meryl Streep to Cate Blanchett, and she is phenomenal. 

There are subtleties Blanchett taps into here that evoke a little bit of Vivien Leigh, Susan Hayward, even flashes of the great Barbara Stanwyck. That said, the current crop of trending A-Listers - the on-and-off excellent Kristen Stewart, Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence, and the very talented Ellen Page - can learn from this performance.

Blue Jasmine, the August release that opened wider this month, is the story of a chichi Park Avenue housewife who takes a mental health nosedive thanks to her cheating financier husband (Alec Baldwin) who pulls a mini-Madoff and then reveals himself to be a world class philanderer.

The telling plot twist involves Jasmine's own role in her downfall, and the roots of an over-reaching self-deception that metastasize into a metaphysical cancer that just looks like ordinary madness to the outside world. 

When Cate Blanchett appears without her tony handbag with wet hair sans dry bar blow-out on a park bench, we know she is practically channeling King Lear on the heath, ready to howl. Like Lear, Jasmine also has to ask: "Who is it that can tell me who I am?"

Writer/director Woody Allen owes something to Streetcar Named Desire in the triangle between the polar opposite sisters with the domineering male dynamic in the household, but Blue Jasmine also defines America at the moment in a scathing and frightening original portrayal. 

Spoiler alerts aside, titular character Jasmine (Blanchett) is America right now. Lady Liberty has been put through her paces, from record domestic foreclosures  to a jaw-dropping international crisis in Syria.

We as a country have been ripped off (Bank bail-outs), cheated on (Wall Street), humiliated on the world stage (hello, NSA scandal),  even pushed again to the brink of a war we can't afford.

Yet, like Woody Allen's brilliantly depicted manipulative naif, we still cling to our designer threads and faith in reinventing ourselves as a country. We are keeping up with the Kardashian accident this bottomed-out country has crashed into.

To watch Cate Blanchett's Jasmine unravel in this tutorial for actors is staggering, both in its angst-ridden craftsmanship, and in the show of pure will at not having caved into the usual halting pace suffered by every other Woody Allen leading lady, apart from Diane Keaton who created that particular style.

When Blanchett takes on a very capable reality check in the form of Andrew Dice Clay, in a hats-off performance as her ex-brother-in-law Augie who has lost everything due to Jasmine's crooked husband, you are ringside at a career definer.

A long way from her Elven Galadriel in Lord of the Rings, the Australian born beauty just blows the text off the page and into a living breathing self-conflicted ball of human emotion. The rawness and authenticity of this character is played off by a shadow on the wall of the depths of deceit inherent in Jasmine. 

These are all choices Blanchett is making as a creative artist. With all due respect to Woody Allen, this is 100% Cate. If you are an actress in your 20's, this is probably the star turn that will influence the rest of your career for its complexity. It's a free master class.

Sally Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, and the rest of the cast also bring their A game. 

Woody Allen makes up for everything that went wrong with Alice, his 1990 Mia Farrow topper also meant as a zeitgeist grabber, with Jasmine. And like Annie Hall, another movie named for its heroine, Blue Jasmine becomes an instant classic that rips the heart out of the times we live in and serves it to us beating.

(See http://www.sonyclassics.com/bluejasmine/ for complete cast and screening locations as this film opens wider.)

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