My Blueberry Nights (2007, PG-13)

In Wong Kar-wai’s body of work, this film is definitely the odd one out.  It’s set in America with all the dialogue in English and a cast of mostly U.S. and U.K. English-speaking actors.  It’s… I don’t know.  It isn’t a bad film, but it’s far and away my least favorite of Wong’s movies.  Even though, on paper, it seems to have a lot of the right elements and features a number of actors that, while newcomers to Wong, I’ve liked/loved in other things, it just doesn’t click for me.

When Elizabeth breaks up with her boyfriend, she leaves her keys to his place at a café for him to pick up.  Every night find her drifting back to the café, though, and every night finds the keys unclaimed.  She begins a tentative friendship with the compassionate owner, bonding with him over heartbreak and pie, but her mind keeps turning to the past.  In an effort to truly move on, she leaves town, slowly working her away across the country and meeting other lost souls like her, from a melancholy alcoholic who can’t let go of his ex-wife to a shrewd gambler avoiding her fractured relationship with her father.

Like I said, theoretically, pretty much everything you need is there.  Lovelorn people who nurture obsessive quirks to push through their loneliness?  Check.  Stunning color saturation and moody film aesthetics, like introspective slow motion?  Check.  Sad, gentle voiceovers?  Check.  Shy connections being made and unmade?  Check.  Really, there are only three of Wong’s big staples missing, and two of them – his regular actors and the Cantonese language – are intentionally left out by virtue of making it an American story, neither of which constitutes an inherent mistake.  The third missing element, for me, is the music.  While the movie makes good use of a few fine songs, they don’t soak into the skin of the film the way Wong’s song choices normally do.  It’s the only aspect that stands out to me as solidly lacking; everything else ought to work.

But that’s the thing.  It doesn’t, not quite, and I don’t know why.  I don’t think it’s the change-up in language/setting – while it’s unusual to see a bunch of white English-speakers in a Wong story, I don’t think speaking English in and of itself makes the movie less successful.  But something’s off.  Nothing quite comes together the way it should, and the film feels a little too slow and a little too removed as a result.

Plenty of actors I like here.  Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn, and Natalie Portman all appear, but even though I enjoy all of them elsewhere, none of them quite seem to fit here.  If anything, the greenest actor of the bunch – Norah Jones, playing Elizabeth in her first acting role – feels the most Wong.  Even though she doesn’t have the same skill and experience as an actor, there’s a quiet authenticity to her portrayal that the others never quite manage. 

Warnings

Brief violence and drinking/smoking.