“My Blueberry Nights” is Wong Kar Wai’s first English-language movie. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s also his worst movie.
If you’re in the mood for love and for this director’s luxuriant self-indulgence, though, it’s a tonic nonetheless — a gorgeously shot road-movie trifle.
The first obstacle to surmount is singer Norah Jones in the leading role of Elizabeth, a heartsore young wanderer. Jones approaches the part from the side, as if it were a microphone and she weren’t sure about the audience. She has a lovely, wide-eyed screen presence, but her character’s passivity is only partly intentional.
Jude Law, by contrast, comes at the camera head-on, as movie stars are supposed to do. He plays Jeremy, a New York diner proprietor nursing a broken heart and keeping his fellow romantics’ keys in a cookie jar on the counter.
Burned by her boyfriend, Elizabeth bonds over blueberry pie with this fellow lost soul before hitting the highway, “taking the longest way to cross the street.”
“My Blueberry Nights” is held together — just — by the director’s love of achy-breaky pop torch songs and multilevel camera shots. And Wong keeps tossing out casting surprises as Elizabeth waitresses her way through the bars and greasy spoons of Middle America. David Strathairn as a mournful alcoholic Memphis cop, Rachel Weisz as his slattern wife (she walks into the movie like a curse laid on your heart), Natalie Portman as a Vegas hell-raiser on a losing streak.
The performances are all over the map — Weisz rises to a particular pitch of badness at one point. Ironically, it’s another singer who makes the sharpest impression: Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, striding through in a neat cameo as Jeremy’s ex.
The movie has been cut down by about 20 minutes since its premiere at last year’s Cannes and I’m not sure it’s for the worse. A little of “Nights” goes a long way.
Wong leans on his soundtrack a little too hard. I could have heard Power’s “The Greatest” one less time.
Music and nostalgia are what fuel all this filmmaker’s movies, though, even a half-baked translation like this one.
