My Blueberry Nights (2008)
Oct 29th, 2008 by John Murphy
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Directed by Wong Kar Wai
reviewed by John Murphy
Internationally acclaimed Chinese filmmaker, Wong Kar Wai, made his debut in the English-language market with My Blueberry Nights, a sweet-looking but bland-tasting confection. His version of America is much like his version of China: neon-saturated streets, smoky bars, and all night diners that form the atmospheric backdrop to tales of lovelorn Romantics, pulling on cigarettes, drowning in drink, indulging in sweet melancholy, and looking impossibly sexy while they do it.
Dulcet-toned singer-songwriter Norah Jones is the movie in microcosm: a beautiful cipher. Her recently heartbroken, passively angsty character drifts from city to city, from job to job, trying to save up enough money to buy a car (so she doesn’t have to keep traveling Greyhound?). She began in New York by telling her story to diner owner Jude Law, who nurses secret sorrows of his own, and clearly nurses a secret crush on his adorable regular. She proceeds to travel Wong’s eye-poppingly beautiful version of the United States, encountering other love-sick lonely-hearts along the way: alcoholic cop (David Straithairn, nobly trying to ground a melodramatic part), Rachel Weisz as the cop’s fierce but sensitive ex; Natalie Portman as a fast-talking, poker-playing Nevada hustler.
Notice a pattern? Norah Jones, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, and Natalie Portman: Wong likes his pretty actors and meditates on their beauty in lingering close-ups. They look lovely, framed against languid curls of smoke, or blurry, red-dotted cityscapes. But they have little to say, weighted down with leaden lines like: “How do you say goodbye to someone you can’t imagine living without? I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t say anything. I just walked away.”
The themes of the film — the fateful decisions people make, the loss of love that leads to self-discovery — drown in the flood of surface texture. Wong relishes the rich colors of the nighttime metropolis, the shimmer of reflective objects, the sfumato of smoke-obscured lighting, and the beautiful and expressive features of his impossibly photogenic cast. But his audience is limited. His films are swooning love letters to cinephiles, to cinema itself, detached from reality. Sadly, My Blueberry Nights follows this lyrical form but with little content.
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