Regular Hot Press readers will have read enough sycophantic interviews and rapturous reviews to know that around these parts we have a gargantuan soft spot for the work of director Wong Kar Wai extending way, way back to 1988’s As Tears Go By. Imagine our disappointment to find that My Blueberry Nights, the esteemed director’s first English language film, might be easily mistaken for a lesser episode of Touched By An Angel.
Here, the seraph in question is MOR babe Norah Jones, a broken-hearted young woman who – like so many movie ciphers before – journeys across America in search or herself or something. Jude Law, a would-be paramour who pines for her from New York, receives regular postcards detailing her adventures. How he hasn’t slipped into a permanent coma, we shall never know.
She travels to Memphis where she works two jobs, then onto Nevada with Natalie Portman’s sassy poker player. (It’s a ‘plot’ development that seems to exist solely to facilitate some painfully half-hearted Thelma And Louise shots.) Along the way, she listens to people’s problems, though she seems to lack either the personality or wherewithal to make the slightest bit of difference.
To be fair to Ms. Jones, her performance is efficient if deadened. But she and the rest of the cast can’t do anything with their wholly implausible characters and a dreadful script. Reliable seasoned talents such as David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz struggle to no avail. Jude Law has never seemed less like A Real Live Human Being. In sharp contrast to the moody silences and hipsterism of Mr. Wong’s other films, the population of My Blueberry Nights simply won’t shut up. They announce their personal tragedies, but simply telling, not showing, is never going to get us onside.
The crummy writing is only the tip of the iceberg. In a move that can only be deemed unwise, Mr. Wong has abandoned the elegant inertia of his later work in favour of the freewheeling, hand-held, choppy style that once fuelled Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. It’s a look that caused us to swoon in the mid-90s when the filmmaker used it to convey the teeming, pulsating pace of his native Hong Kong. A decade on and the same stylistic tics have been recycled and regurgitated by so many by car commercials and music videos they’ve lost all potency. Worse, these suffocating visuals are completely at odds with the vast American expanse.
In the end you suspect the only thing standing between My Blueberry Nights and downright infamy is its slightness. Aspiring to the condition of diuretic, it simply passes straight on through. “I wonder how you’ll remember me?” simpers Ms. Jones in voiceover.
Huh? Who the hell are you again?