Being woefully behind in watching Oscar-nominated movies, I went to Redbox and got the only qualifying one in there. Blue Jasmine, if you haven't seen it, is about a posh woman who falls from greatness and has to move in with her not-posh sister. Cate Blanchett plays Jasmine and spends the movie in varying degrees of nervous breakdown. (She never talks to Frodo, not once!)
Her character is isolated from everybody else in the movie. I don't sympathize with her character. The audience is not, generally, going to feel sorry that she cannot be very very rich anymore. Her loss is only vaguely understandable. We watch her in her isolation.
But there's one part in the movie where I felt like she got all of us. She's sitting down across a booth from her sister's two kids. They've heard some things about her; she got picked up in the street, talking to herself. She admits to it, over her Stoli martini, drunk like in the rest of the movie. She tells them she had to have electro-shock therapy to set her brain right. Why? They ask her.
Jasmine: There's only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.
She speaks for us exactly once, and it's awesome.
I completely agree.
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