If an American producer, in the wake of Wong Kar-wai’s breakout success with Chungking Express, had attempted an ill-advised English-language remake it would, sadly, have likely looked a lot like Wong’s own My Blueberry Nights—an awkward exercise in translating the Hong Kong filmmaker’s despondent extravagance to a Western setting. The bones are here, in a screenplay written by Wong and Lawrence Block: a triptych structure, featuring overlapping characters; doomed romanticism as the thematic thread; and pop music as a moody through line. The latter includes a song by Norah Jones, who also stars as a recently dumped woman in New York City. In the first story, she drowns her sorrows by eating blueberry pie in a diner run by a charming expatriate (Jude Law); in the second, she flees New York to waitress and bartend in Memphis; in the third, she falls in with a down-on-her-luck gambler (Natalie Portman) after moving to Nevada. From the throbbing casino lighting in Las Vegas to the glowing elevated trains in New York, visually this is clearly a Wong film (the cinematographer this time is Darius Khondji). But everything else feels off. The extensive dialogue sequences literalize the sort of things Wong usually captures via woozy imagery; moments that have powerful emotional weight in his other features here feel like silly gestures. And while Jones is clearly not an experienced enough actor to carry the entire picture, it’s shocking to see far worse performances coming from the likes of Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn, who play a boozy, blowsy couple in the Memphis section. We know Wong works wonders with actors—see In the Mood for Love in particular—and that Weisz and Strathairn are supreme talents, suggesting that My Blueberry Nights might have been cursed from the start.
(10/27/2021)
