MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS The Weinstein Company
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: C+
Directed by: Wong Kar Wai
Written By: Wong Kar Wai, Lawrence Block, story by Wong Kar Wai
Cast: Norah Jones, Jude Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, Chan Marshall
Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 3/20/08
Opens: April 4, 2008 Wong Kar Wai’s films are nothing if not beautiful to look at. His “In the Mood for Love,” which some consider his best work, involves a man and woman in the same Hong Kong apartment who realize that their spouses are having affairs. Now in his first English-language film, “My Blueberry Nights,” he moves into the road-movie genre, his characters located in New York, Nevada and Arizona, but this movie is for special tastes. There’s not really much of a story but Wong provides his usual moody atmosphere. In a few scenes he focuses on a blueberry pie as though putting the dessert under a microscope to watch the blues of the pie and the white of the vanilla ice cream moving across the screen as though they were a close-up of a blood sample from a man who just ate a blueberry pie. The woman who had consumed the luscious dish is quite an eater. At the close of the story, she downs a steak with one order of fries and a side dish of mashed potatoes. Yet she looks as though she never touches more than a salad. The woman in question is Norah Jones, whose pop songs have awarded her quite a coterie of fans. Born in New York with the name Geetali Norah Jones Shankar, she is the daughter of world-renowned sitar player Ravi Shankar and Sue Jones, a dancer. While she has turned out albums like “Come Away With Me,” “Feels Like Home,” and “Not Too late,” she is a newcomer to the celluloid screen, Ms. Jones performs in the role of Elizabeth, devastated by a break-up with her boyfriend of five years. She goes to a café in New York under the elevated transit (Bronx?) for sweets and gets an extra dividend: a sweet owner, Jeremy (Jude Law), who consoles her but does not stop her from heading out West on a road trip by bus to help forget her misfortune. In Memphis and later in Nevada she meets some strange people: Arnie (David Straathairn) who is drunk by night, a cop by day; Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz), Arnie’s estranged wife whom Arnie begs to come back to him; and the most vivacious of all, Leslie (Natalie Portman), a high-stakes gambler who partners with Elizabeth for part of the road trip. How does Elzabeth fare at the conclusion? In a predictable way—despite the writer-director’s rep for the surprises—but “My Blueberry Nights” is all about the photography in setting up the mood, particularly the soft-focus shots that finds Darius Khondji’s lenses roaming about looking for objects to define sharply and Ry Cooder’s pop soundtrack. There’s some fine acting by David Strathairn as a morbid barfly by night, frustrated at losing his wife, but Norah Jones comes across as a blank slate. There’s an awful lot of smoking going on in this film. Not Rated. 90 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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