My Blueberry Nights (2008)
My Blueberry Nights, the first Wong Kar-Wai picture to be set in the United States, has been greeted with general indifference-inspiring some to mount a passionate defense of the film as an overlooked achievement. As with many pictures triggering these sorts of varying reactions, Wong’s newest falls somewhere in between. My Blueberry Nights is one of those pictures that most won’t be able to settle into, and that inability may cause its fans to overrate it in understandable retaliation. But this sort of over-reaching, the kind that greets many talented filmmakers’ troubled pictures, actually does the films in question a disservice: further convincing the people not in on it that the fans are hopelessly deluding themselves-and that these people are perhaps talking themselves into the picture’s greatness before they’ve even seen it.
My Blueberry Nights is a daydream even by the standards of its creator. The picture channels, and sustains, that inner melancholic fantasy you entertain when you sit down at a strange bar alone-that possibility, that hope, that you’ll find someone or encounter someone, or get into some sort of adventure, that will shake out those cobwebs of doubt that spin in our heads on a daily basis. My Blueberry Nights is a romantic rhapsody of why we go to bars in the first place, and why we go to movies. With only a few exceptions, the picture is set entirely in bars and cafés, and Wong is clearly drunk on American iconography-the flamboyance and weirdness isn’t plastic or calculated, but powered by a deep, intense movie love. This is why people love Wong Kar-Wai’s pictures. Wong’s films, at their best and even their not-so-best, tap into, and get away with, primal yearnings that normally sink into the maudlin. It takes a daredevil, a magician and a mad talent to pull off what seems to come naturally to Wong; like David Lynch, he is absolutely impossible to imitate without falling splat on your face. Wong’s films are true cinematic fingerprints-for better and worse.
My Blueberry Nights opens with an intoxicating immediacy and lack of clarity. Elizabeth (the singer Norah Jones) walks into Jeremy’s (Jude Law) café one night looking for a lover who left her. Elizabeth is distracted, mysterious, carried away with everything that isn’t in front of her-poetry, her vanished man, and some sort of road trip she is to take (a long way to the other side of the sidewalk). Jeremy is disconcertingly open and kind-explaining to Elizabeth the keys that rest in a bowl on the bar and the pie that always remains as his shift reaches its end. Elizabeth and Jeremy have clearly connected in the most star-struck movie way we can imagine, but Elizabeth longs for the trip that will cleanse her of that now past man.
It’s all as moony as it sounds (starting with the title metaphor) and purposefully searching in a freshman girl’s sort of way (the picture is, when the style has been pruned away, like a novel aimed at young women). Wong succeeds as well as he does through pure, reckless commitment: one smirk and the balloon would pop. Wong seduces us with his usual slow, surreal, dazed visual mastery; and with ellipses that take us from one emotional high to the next with little in the way of standard connective tissue. Throughout her cross-country journey, which includes Memphis and Las Vegas, Elizabeth encounters a number of other lost souls; most memorably David Strathairn as an alcoholic policeman who misses his unfaithful wife (Rachel Weisz). As with everyone else in the movie, Strathairn is asked to play a type, but he imbues that type with something grounded and convincingly bewildered and wannabe numb-he’s the one character hounded by a past hurt that’s just a little more than a vapor-the only character that seems to have graduated from that college lit course from which everyone else in the movie is quoting.
Strathairn’s un-anesthetized longing also brings something out in Norah Jones. Jones wouldn’t appear to be much of actress, and she doesn’t have a strong presence, but the latter is intentional, and she is used cannily by Wong. Jones wisely holds back, and lets everyone else in the movie, and in the theatres, come to her. We see why all the characters take to her so-projecting little, she’s allowed to be whatever they want-the ideal bartender. Jones is a beautiful woman, but in a soft way that encourages that male fantasy of being saved by a beautiful young woman. You see in Jones an ideal, un-forced embodiment of the prototypical female romantic lead. Jones and Strathairn mesh well, they feed on one another’s blank spots-and this lends the picture an element of give and take, of spontaneous release from the lovelorn huffing and puffing. Weisz’s performance is a mistake though, some sort of Southern caricature that’s too broad and mechanical for the empathetic, magical balance that Strathairn and Jones strike up. But Wong is too generous to even totally squander Rachel Weisz, her final moment, a paying of a debt, registers.
The chief appeals of My Blueberry Nights, its modesty, slightness and good temper, eventually irritate. The episode in Vegas near the end, featuring Natalie Portman as a gambler with daddy issues; is tedious and too familiar (Portman’s performance is also every bit as off as Weisz’s) and you begin to resent the film’s airiness, it’s refusal to amount to much of anything. Wong’s prior films could be spacey and were generally unconcerned with traditional narrative propulsion too, but they were driven by a rawer, lived-in something-they have a discord this film sorely needs. 2046, the pseudo-sequel to In the Mood for Love, is considered to be somewhat inferior to that first film, but that’s a misconception. 2046 is more ambitious and daring, and takes off from a jarring change in the Tony Leung Chiu Wai character in between films. This film has no such surprises; Wong’s preoccupation with American archetypes may have distracted him too much. My Blueberry Nights is off-and-on enchanting and memorable, it is some sort of accomplishment after all, but, by the end, we’re left with a desire we hope never to face in our deepest romantic reveries: we want out.
★★★
July 11th, 2008 at 5:22 am
In my own piece, I think I called the film an ‘awkward lover.’ That description appears to mirror your own sentiments, although you were more generous (and managed to stay engaged longer) than I was. Once Weisz had her breakdown, I was out for the count, and the rest of the film was an exercise in watch-checking.
“With only a few exceptions, the picture is set entirely in bars and cafés, and Wong is clearly drunk on American iconography-the flamboyance and weirdness isn’t plastic or calculated, but powered by a deep, intense movie love.”
One of the best lines I’ve read in a film review in quite some time.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:12 am
Great blog and reviews. We’re WKW fans too. Will check back often Bowen…
July 11th, 2008 at 10:29 am
I have mixed feeling about WKW — while he’s clearly blazed his own neon trail, it seems too much about surface obsession, with CHUNKING EXPRESS being imho the height of his vision.
But based on Craig’s take and yours, I need to watch this.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I think we all know where I stand on this one, I’m proudly self-deluded. Yet, I’m also aware enough to know that this movie simply isn’t going to play for a lot of people. Yet I can only react to how the movie made me feel when I saw it. I certainly don’t think the positive reactions are any more irrational than the pans that came out of Cannes.
This is all a preface to say I enjoyed your more clear-eyed approach to the film, particularly your defense of Norah Jones. I think you nail exactly what Wong’s intentions with her were. She’s a kind of neutral reactive agent for the characters in the film and for the audience, though she does have an interesting arc of her own.
I think Matt Zoller Seitz put it best when he compared the film to a loose late night jam session. Not heavy and a little ill-focused, but kind of exhilarating in its own way.
July 11th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Excellent review, Chuck, I very much enjoyed reading this. I think I’m close to Craig but also close to you in regards to the film. As a longtime Wong Kar-Wai fan, I appreciate so much of My Blueberry Nights, while on the other hand being free to admit that I find it to be “weaker” than his other films.
I like your take on Norah Jones as well, and think you nail what Wong was going for with her.
The Rachel Weisz performance troubles me, too.
There’s a lot to love, though. I consider 2046 Wong’s formal masterpiece, while Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, for starters, are sentimental favorites as well as great films, too.
My Blueberry Nights does feel a lot like the late night jam session Matt Zoller Seitz wrote about. Many critics just seemed to follow the herd in assaulting it.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Holy crap. Get paid for writing, dude. I know I’m always unabashedly gushing about your reviews, but I can’t help myself when I read bits like your second sentence in your second paragraph.
As the rest goes, we meet on almost everything, most importantly Jones and Weisz. I wasn’t as anxious for it to end as you were, however - in fact I was a little paralyzed in a dream state after the last frame.
Also, I don’t know if I would agree that MBN has been greeted with “general indifference”. To this point I would consider it one of the most divisive films of the year. If you mean it just hasn’t made a mark with masses, well I would agree with that, but when it comes up opinions tend to be strong in one direction or the other.
Of course I usually bow out of the conversation fairly early, this being my first WKW film. Not my last, though…
July 12th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Fine review. I’m not as willing to forgive Jones as you are, but I get the vibe about her being whatever the other characters in the movie want. In my own review, I call her a “witness,” albeit one that gets drawn in.
I also am not as down on Weisz as you are; at first, as a Southerner myself, I was put off by her over-the-top Southern accent; by the end of her bit, however, she’d won me over (maybe it was just her beauty, however)!
July 12th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Thank you all for the positive responses-it will go directly to my head, I promise.
Evan-I began to drift a little toward the end myself-the “awkward lover” idea is apt.
1minutefilmreview-Welcome aboard. Hope to hear from you again.
Christian-I’ve wondered if WKW is perhaps a little too enamored of surfaces from time to time, but his surface is so much more engaging that most’s substance. I love CHUNGKING EXPRESS-and that image of that girl dancing to “California Dreaming” has always stuck with me. My favorite Wong, at this point though, is most likely 2046.
Craig- “I certainly don’t think the positive reactions are any more irrational than the pans that came out of Cannes.” I agree-it’s a modest film, and should be viewed as such, and offers moments of beauty. The hyperbole on both ends can be warying.
Alexander-I’m with you on 2046-and FALLEN ANGELS (which I really need to re-watch) as well as CKE.
Daniel-Thanks alot-I’m trying to make the money-for-writing thing happen, hopefully sooner rather than later. The indifference comment was a reaction to the general public-but the movie was barely released so the public really didn’t get a chance anyway. I also read several “eh” two and half star type reviews (one was Jim Emerson’s) so that was where that comment came from, but you’re right-the picture has certainly provoked strong responses in others.
Rick-I love Weisz too-but I thought her character was too self-consciously movie-ish even for the extreme style of this picture-I felt that it disrupted the chemistry and mood that Jones and Strathairn were establishing-but I’m right with you on Weisz’s final scene.
July 15th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
I have now read two of your full reviews Chuck, and I hereby join the chorus of accolades. You really use language that brings the film into focus.
Having said that I will say that I felt the same way after a first viewing (which was in the back row of the tunnel-like Angelika in Manhattan) but on second viewing this intoxicating experience came fully to life. I fully understand the criticisms, but for me they fall under a different guideline for judging this film. Perversely maybe, but it all works.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:52 am
I do look forward to checking My Blueberry Nights out again, because I can imagine a similar second-viewing turnaround happening to me too Sam. I also wish that I could have seen it in a theatre (never came to me) because, as we know, that makes all the difference as well.