I just watched Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's film staring the phenomenal Cate Blanchett as a classy New York woman going off her rocker through a series of tragic traumas, disappointments, and errors.
No wonder she won a Oscar!
This moving and shocking film reminds me of a Hitchcock film called The Wrong Man, I think. In it, Henry Fonda plays a musician working at the Stork Club or 21. He lives in Queens with his young wife and child. One day he gets picked by the police, thrown into a lineup, identified by two eye witnesses, and arrested for the armed robbery of a mortgage company, or something. It is based on a true story.
The plot develops and there is no way he can prove or convince the police that he is the wrong man. His sweet wife has a nervous breakdown. Eventually, while he is in lockup, the two lady witnesses see another arrestee brought into the precinct over another event, with the same hat, same build, same posture, and very close to the same face as Henry Fonda. They tell the cops that this guy was the real gunman they saw do the robbery. This happened about 1950.
The police sorted it all out and let Fonda go. We see him later taking the bus with his son to the State Hospital, and with his wife on a bench by the grass in the distance, the doctor is explaining to him, "Yes, she doesn't know you because she's in shock. She may come out of it in days, or weeks, or months. Sometimes they never come out if it. It's just one of those things."
I never got over the lesson that something totally out of your hands, with no one particularly to blame, could happen to demolish your life, take your mother away, and put one away for good.
That's what this is a story about, focused on the wife, with no hospital and no doctor at all. Left homeless replaying the conversations out loud chronicling her downfall, alone, with no makeup, dirty hair, and a Chanel jacket.
Woody Allen is an amazing dialog artist, inter alia See this film.
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