LGM Film Club, Part 430: My Blueberry Nights

I am such a huge fan of Wong Kar Wai, well, at least until My Blueberry Nights. Everything from As Tears Go By in 1988 to 2046 in 2004 is between excellent and one of my favorite films ever. So I was so disappointed when Wong came to the United States and what resulted was My Blueberry Nights, released in 2007. Everyone hated it. I remember reading reviews asking if Wong had been pulling the wool over our eyes with his Chinese language films since this was obviously so bad when we could understand the language? Well, no, that’s not correct at all. And really, Wong slowed way, way down after that. I haven’t seen 2013’s The Grandmaster, which was a martial arts film I’m not sure anyone wanted to see Wong make. He has a long TV series out now that is available on Criterion and I will probably check that out soon.

But I really hadn’t thought about My Blueberry Nights for a long time. So I decided to watch it again.

It does not improve with age.

There are so many problems here. Now, I guess to start with, it’s not actually a terrible movie. It’s just a bad film by Wong standards. But what makes this a mediocre film by any standard and a bad film by Wong standards falls into three categories. First, Wong had nothing to say about the United States and he clearly wanted to say something about the United States.

The story is this. Norah Jones walks into her boyfriend’s favorite bar in New York. It’s owned by Jude Law. The boyfriend has been cheating on her. Law tells her this. She stays around and cries and is depressed and all the things you are when that happens to you. Law likes her (shortly, he will really like her). They connect. But then Jones disappears, first to Memphis and then to Reno. So it’s a road trip movie, ironic since part of the plot is Jones trying to save enough money to buy a car. But Wong has nothing to say about any of these places in America, or about America period. That’s OK as far as it goes. One can set a movie in America while not really saying anything about it, but that’s much harder with a road movie.

Second, and more importantly, the writing is bad. The plot just leads nowhere. The New York part is totally fine. The Memphis part follows the theme of lost love, with David Strathairn playing a cop drinking himself to death because his younger wife (Rachel Weisz) doesn’t love him anymore. That works OK, as far as it goes. But the Nevada scenes, which revolve around a professional gambler played by Natalie Portman, are totally pointless. They lead to absolutely nothing. The whole last 1/3 of the movie is just completely flat. The love theme is lost, which after is Wong’s key insight on the human condition, and we deal with a character who hates herself and trusts no one, but there’s no emotional connection there at all.

Third, the disastrous casting. The men are fine. Law and Strathairn are both perfectly fine in their roles. But the women don’t work. Nothing against Jones, who does a fine Everywoman, but she does not have the emotional weight that the role really needs. She’s a bit flat in a role that’s asking her to be Maggie Cheung, which is totally unfair to a non-professional actor. Of course, both Weisz and Portman are outstanding actors. But they are both given Benoit Blanc-level of ridiculous accents and are both not playing to their strengths, especially Portman. Now, what if you took Natalie Portman and cast her in that Jones role? Now that would be an actor who could pull that off.

So I have no idea what Wong was doing on this film. I wish it was better. But I think I hated it more the second time. Sometimes, directors just run out of things to say. Think of John Sayles, as one prominent example. It was the same with Wong. It happens. Glad we have his great early work. Watch that.