There is something about watching a Woody Allen movie that always starts me squirming in my seat.  Blue Jasmine, his latest and much acclaimed offering, is no different.  Ninety minutes of watching self-absorbed people careening into each other with not too much change or growth.  Now Cate Blanchett does a terrific job of careening, make no mistake about it. If what you want to see is an actor showing off her chops, you’ll like her being Jasmine blue.  If self absorption, on screen or off, irritates you, you’ll find yourself with an itch that badly needs scratching.

We open with Jasmine, nicely appointed, yakking the ear off an accommodating, middle aged, female, seat mate on a plane bound for, it turns out, San Francisco.  She arrives at the flat of her half-sister Ginger [Sally Hawkins] (both adopted) on South Van Ness Ave and is so simultaneously imperious and frazzled with the cab driver it’s hard to believe he keeps his cool.  In fact, he doesn’t mind waiting when no one opens the door for her, and  he carries her heavy bags up the stairs.  Since when has a cabbie done either?  Through a series of flashbacks we get the story — her marriage to Hal [Alec Baldwin ], a duplicitous, charming, Bernie Madoff-like character, his gobbling up the start-up cash of the sister and her then husband [Andrew Dice Clay], Jasmine’s unkindness, her society superficiality.  She finally clues into the infidelities we have seen mounting, the marriage collapses [spoiler alert; great acting here!], she comes west.  Well, there’s more but you’ll want to save the best for last.

Somehow I could not abandon myself to enjoying it: self destruction with a laugh track. 

Another thing: why do Allen’s San Francisco characters seem like they’re actually in New York?  Look, sound and act like?  Jack Kerouac did this in The Subterraneans, moving his NYC perambulations right into San Francisco but his characters were all bi-coastal hipsters, not car mechanics (grease monkeys!?) with goombah accents.  Woody!  Car mechanics in San Francisco are likely to be college graduates reading Young Werther and hiking the Sierras in REI outfits.  Granted, Chile [Bobby Cannavale], the mechanic cries in public, showing his SNAG [Sensitive New Age Guy] bona fides but like so much of Allen’s conception it is more embarrassing to watch than it is humorous or insight into a person, failing or flying.

Perhaps the encounters, or lack of encounters,  are meant to be read as pratfalls, of the emotional kind, somehow funny, like the man slipping on a banana or walking into a door, but to me they aren’t.

I know the following complaint is a little too parochial but when a furious Jasmine bails out of a car at San Francisco’s Marina Green, without any money as far as we know, and next thing we see is her staggering into her step-son’s record store in Oakland — 13 miles away and no pedestrians allowed on the Bay Bridge– this viewer’s suspension of disbelief collapses — though it had already been sinking at the sight of Ginger’s artsy three room apartment in which she is raising two sub-teen boys on the wages of a convenience store clerk.  I don’t think so.  By the way, Woody, there is a funky record store on Grant Ave in North Beach, where Jasmine might have actually gotten to.  Plus, you would have had the chance to poke around North Beach with its old bohemian corners.  These things may not matter to some but to me it looks like he doesn’t care or doesn’t think such things matter; he is leaving his knitting pretty loose.

Anyhoo, Blue Jasmine is admired by many  [“Startling and Brilliant,” “Better than anything you can imagine,” “jaw dropping,” “working at the top of his game,”] leaving me an odd man out. Most of the reviews you’ll find will be gushing, many on to the connection to Blanche Dubois of Street Car.  For one with sensibilities more like mine here is Christoper Orr at The Atlantic.

I liked the soundtrack — vintage Allen, love of jazz.  And I did like guessing where the Marin County shots were taken, while thinking it very odd that Woody would have a State Department fellow buying a home in Tiburon, [or was it Belvedere?] where $3 million would be considered cheap.

To enjoy Allen’s films I have to view them through the imagined frames of his iconic glasses:  this is the way Woody sees car mechanics, Marin, the working class, women, men.   It’s like looking at the famous Steinberg map of New York City, the City enormous in the foreground, the rest of the country just a cliche beyond the Hudson.