Review of My Blueberry Nights

"America," Not America

No one is disputing the fact that Wong Kar-wai is a very serious, seriously gifted filmmaker. Not one of the critics that have given the film across-the-board pans. Wong has come to be known as a formal master of the highest degree, but in My Blueberry Nights, he pushes his comfort boundaries by making his first English-language film. Of course, when "outsiders" look at American cinema, there is one genre that dominates above all, and that is the road movie, the one genre that is absolutely American. But Wong's romanticization of the American road movie, as well as his romanticization of more minor tenets of "Americana" as represented in cinema, serves to undercut his film rather than support it. In fact, it is its downfall. My Blueberry Nights' plot reads more like a parody of a road movie than an actual one. Elizabeth (Norah Jones) is a New Yorker who spends most of her time hanging out with the attractive Brit (Jude Law) who runs a local coffee shop (who doesn't?). She's hanging out with him because he helps her forget about - or at least, feel better about - a recent breakup she's had. One day, she decides to leave New York, and set out across the country in search of adventure. We don't see her on the road as much as we see her living in various locales - the South, Nevada, et cetera. But it's not only about the places she goes - it's about the people she meets along the way! An alcoholic cop who's estranged from his wife (David Strathairn, whose talents are wasted)! His sexpot estranged southern belle wife (Rachel Weisz)! A down-on-her-luck poker player whose father is dying (Natalie Portman)! Does these characters sound like cliches, like caricatures? They are. Were Wong and co-writer Lawrence Block aware of the cliched nature of these characters? Most definitely. My guess is that they imagined they'd work in a kind of caricatured, romanticized sense. In fact, this weak character depiction only serves to insult the audience. If the characters had been more fleshed out - or better yet, even less - the film might have worked. But as it stands, the characters are neither developed enough to be taken as anything more than caricatures, nor are they so one-dimensional as to clearly be self-reflexive cliches. The result is messy. There is a definite worship of Americana present in My Blueberry Nights; the more difficult thing is to wonder to what extent this worship is self-aware, self-critical and/or self-mocking. It's impossible to tell. Surely no one could take this kind of material seriously, right? A cafe where blueberry pies are made every day, even though no one eats them? Where New Yorkers leave their unwanted sets of keys to their significant others' apartments? A waitress naive enough to lend a GAMBLER her LIFE SAVINGS!? Come on! My only recourse is that perhaps Wong is mocking these cliches, and the film is, underneath the surface, actually a subversive, scathing critique of the idiocy of American films. But I think Wong is too reverent of those films for that to be the case. Perhaps, then, he simply wanted to make a sweet, simple film that combined his own aesthetic with American sensibilities, and this was the result. Speaking of aesthetics, this is Wong's first film in quite some time that was not lensed by Christopher Doyle, the man who arguably holds the title of World's Greatest DP. The new cinematographer is Darius Khondji, who did a fantastic job with Michael Haneke's Funny Games U.S. Khondji's work isn't quite as spectacular here. It's still very much the Wong aesthetic we've become used to - slow-shutter speed, abstract inserts, expressionist glows - except that Wong's typical color palette of greens, grays and dark blues has been substituted for a lot of neons, reds, warm colors. The result is not as visually striking as his previous work. This is also partially due to the fact that so much of the film has been shot on obvious sets - there's very little location work that feels authentic. In a film that is based so much around location, this is a shame. If he's going to take us to the South, or Nevada, why not go around the streets of Memphis or Las Vegas? Wong avoids this move entirely. There's no doubt that Wong Kar-wai is one of the most important filmmakers working today. It's quite commendable that a filmmaker in his position is still pushing his comfort zone, forcing himself to try what he has not yet done before. One can only hope that as he continues to work in new realms, he perhaps gains a greater sense of self-awareness. --Zachary Wigon

Posted on 04/08/08 by: FC Scribes 12:45 AM