My Blueberry Nights opens in New York within the comfy confines of a small café owned by an expatriate Englishman named Jeremy, Jude Law. While busy taking care of his numerous customers, he receives a phone call from a woman asking him if he remembered a man eating meatloaf, later it becomes evident that it was pork chops and not meatloaf, and soon a pretty, but disheveled woman, Elizabeth, played by Norah Jones, makes an appearance at the café and gives Jeremy a set of keys in case her ex-boyfriend comes back. Each night after that occurrence, Elizabeth returns to the café to see if the keys have been picked up and converse with Jeremy. The two strike up a quick friendship and eat the café's leftovers each night. Some things like cheesecake are completely gone each day, some things like chocolate mousse are mostly gone each day, and there is always an untouched blueberry pie because it is left unwanted. It is this pie that Elizabeth eats every night and after a few weeks, she heads on an impromptu road trip.
During her travels, Elizabeth meets a wide assortment of interesting characters. In Tennessee she meets Arnie Copeland, a kind-hearted, but alcoholic policeman who is a patron at both the diner and bar she works at. While drinking to soothe his broken heart, Arnie becomes friends with the much younger Elizabeth and she learns of his wife Sue Lynne who left him. Things seem moderately stable for Arnie, at least within the haze of alcohol, until, one night, when Sue Lynne comes into the bar with another man. After Tennessee, Elizabeth heads west to the land of gamblers where she meets a blonde, southern female gambler named Leslie, Natalie Portman, who loses everything in a match against a fellow with a large forehead sporting a repulsive Hawaiian shirt. Again, Elizabeth becomes friends with her fellow drifter and learns things about others and herself in the process.
Meanwhile, Jeremy, who has been receiving postcards without a return address from Elizabeth, back at the café, writes numerous postcards to Elizabeth, hoping that one of them will reach her, because his heart has opened to her in her absence.
A number of film viewers seemed to be against My Blueberry Nights while it was in the pre-production stage because it was Wong Kar Wai's first film using all non-Asian actors and actresses, as if the aesthetics and beauty found In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express could not be translated over from Asian actors to non-Asian actors. With Taiwanese directors Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-hsien having done similar endeavors, it stands to reason that Wong would be successful also. While the accents of Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz are a bit overdone and the script does in fact sound like it is coming from a translation at points, the Wong Kar Wai sense of film aesthetic still strongly comes through with his wonderful selection of music, Cat Power's "The Greatest" plays a prominent role in the film, and its sense of loneliness and the beauty and sadness that can be found in loneliness when one is not only alone in body, but in an unfamiliar land. Some say that this is Wong Kar Wai's worst film, but with his worst being better than most, My Blueberry Nights is still a worthy film for the Wong Kar Wai canon, and should not be scoffed at by his "fans" because it stars non-Asian actors and actresses. My Blueberry Nights (The Miriam Collection)
There is much in Wong Kar-Wai's first all English production to admire, but the cast, the dialogue, and the translation of Asian aesthetics unto accent-dimmed performances is so pronounced we have no option but to enjoy the movie solely for its artistic merit while lamenting its prosaic shortcomings. The usual antics and brilliance of the director are all deployed to a whimsical effectiveness, if sometimes deliberately indulged. The usual close-ups and askance visual is present frame after frame, with opaque intrusions, slantwise peering, obstructed lavishness, and aided by the diner/pub setting the movie is infused with neon latency. In fact the plot is simple and very bleak. Action hardly ever takes place during the day, save for the occasional interlude which seems to be a way to mark as pronounced the comparative glare that the night offers. At times we have the camera slide its intensity along a bar or a table, stolidly stuck on a fork pricking through a slice of pie, or meandering about the outskirts of a bar, column after column, shadows crawling senselessly through a disorderly tension that seems innocent enough to hide behind the crevices of our visual. Overall the very Asian aesthetic quality of the camerawork tellingly foreshadows a candor that has us become voyeurs more so than spectators. In Asian culture it is best not to invade one's private space and here it is carried out to such beauty that it offers a sense of indiscreet respect.
Where the movie falters however is in its casting, of which some are excellent artists used in a middling unfortunate fashion. Jude Law and Natalie Portman are sensational actors but oddly cast in the drama. Their intensity is unique but too forceful for the narrative introspective layover. The graceful Norah Jones is very mediocre. She has promise but the flick rests too much on her inner turmoil to be successful since she cannot be the keystone of the narrative in a way to match the intensity and bravado of her colleagues. The story is very simple. Elizabeth is stuck on her boyfriend whose just broken-up with her. She will have to labor through her incredulousness and inability to let go. The diner's owner, played by Jude Law offers her a shoulder and an ear while terribly straining the poetic attitude of the atmosphere by introducing a dialogue that metaphor driven closes the doors it chances to open. In fact while observing the action from behind window panes or timidly joining the session while tip-toeing about a door left ajar we discover a tenuous delicacy of touch that is as fragile as Norah Jones' performance.
David Strathairn, cast as Arnie, the alcoholic policeman who cannot let go of his wife, strikes a rapport of morbid proportions with Lizzie. While on a lovelorn escapade to Memphis, Lizzie nurses her loss and begins to recover, but in the process as she learns to give up, somehow that same sense of absence transfers to Arnie who is separated from a wife who wants nothing to do with him. The perfection of his character study and depth only highlights the misses of the others, including Arnie's estranged wife Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz). Arnie gives up on a night of madness and overglowing anger but determines to commit suicide. Enters Natalie Portman, a southern vixen with a penchant for gambling.
The neon-hued camerawork receives added sheen from a trip to Vegas on a brand new Jaguar, only to find out that the every win is also a loss. Ultimately that is the upshot of the narrative which is brightly demented by the braggadocio devil-may care sensibility of Leslie (Natalie Portman). The death of Leslie's father causes a reunion between Lizzie and the diner's proprietor Jeremy, who functions as the jar of sweets everyone is sure with due time Lizzie will find her way to. Time spent through glowing hues that distil an aura of hopeless references and tame performances that jarr all the more because uninspired while beset by the contrasting tenderness of the visual.
A movie worth watching, because of the addictive intensity provided by the camerawork of Darius Khondji, but the elegiac tone of a "Chungking Express" or "In the Mood for Love" is affected by the sobering vapidity of a plot that plays with the notion of loss and gain by using a maudlin dialogue and a cloyed, exhausted attempt at allegorizing by way of sappy, overburdened poetics. - Jude Law - Wong Kar Wai - David Strathairn - Norah Jones'
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