Wong Kar-Wai, My Blueberry Nights

Photo Credit: Kathryn Durfee

by Freeman Montaque
04/08/2008

It opened this past year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s director Wong Kar-Wai’s first film in English. It includes an all-star cast composed of a Grammy winner, an Academy Award winner and three Academy Award nominees. There was a lot My Blueberry Nights had to live up to, but unfortunately, it doesn’t come close to capitalizing on its expected excellence.

Elizabeth (Norah Jones) has just learned she was cheated on by her boyfriend. She comes into the diner where her ex was seen with another woman. She’s angry and sad until the handsome owner Jeremy (Jude Law) comes to her rescue offering his shoulder to cry on and his pies. It’s obvious after a while that the two are fond of one another, but Elizabeth has to leave, and she ends up going on a sort of road trip where she meets a few other people who are suffering as well. It’s after all these encounters that Elizabeth realizes she doesn’t have it so bad.

I understand that this is Norah Jones’ first major acting job, but her performance for the first half of the film is almost unbearable. Her emotions are overdone, and she just comes off as a spoiled kid who throws a tantrum when they don’t get what they want. She pouts a lot and stares out windows thinking about things, but that's really as far as her acting goes. She eventually does get better, but that may be because there are more characters to look at besides her after a while.

Jude Law really does nothing too special here, either. He basically just gives Jones’ character his talk about how his blueberry pie is special but no one will eat it, and he occasionally makes out with her while she sleeps with whipped cream on her face. Are these dream sequences or did they really happen? I couldn’t tell, but it doesn’t make watching them any less weird.

The supporting roles really save the film, though Rachel Weisz seems to overact at times while she attempts to tackle a Southern accent. She’s basically walking on eggshells with the time allotted her. Natalie Portman adds a sense of freshness and fun to an otherwise mundane story as the gambler who’s not afraid of anything except facing her father. It’s a role she seems to have had a good time playing, and it translates in her performance on screen.

The main reason, if not the only reason, to see this film is for David Stratharin’s performance as a cop dealing with his alcoholism and his cheating wife, who is played by Weisz. You find his character interesting as soon as you’re introduced to him, and you wish the film had given him more screen time once he’s gone. He’s the first character you feel for, which is a little bit worrisome, considering how he comes after Elizabeth and Jeremy are introduced, and you really feel no alignment towards either of them.

There are other things wrong with the film besides the majority of the acting. The camera work seems almost experimental at times. There’s plenty of slow motion, blurred vision, shots of landscapes, and even a moment when everything is green, as we view the diner late at night from the security camera’s point of view. Experimentation with the camera is not necessarily a problem, but it is when it’s used excessively. In the case of this film, it comes close a little too close to that.

The pacing of the film is also less than stellar. Some scenes seem to go on too long with no real immediate purpose. After a while, you’re likely to squirm around in your seat, waiting for another likable character like Strathairn’s or Portman’s to appear, only to find that they won’t. With that in mind, you wonder much longer you have to sit through another of Elizabeth’s encounter before she realizes, as you have by now, that she doesn’t have it as bad as she thought. Is it really necessary for someone to travel around and meet different people suffering from circumstances more important than break-ups before that same person understands what they should do? Maybe it is, but this all struck me as being a little too much.

While it might appear to be an appetizing treat for film lovers, My Blueberry Nights is a mixed bag of a film that includes, for the most part, mediocre acting, cliched story lines, and technical faults. It’s hard to recommend, though I state again that Stratharin is worth a watch, but even his performance may not be enough reason to sit through a 90 minute film that feels like a bland road trip that ultimately goes nowhere.