Any time you put the lovely Norah Jones, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz in a film directed by Wong Kar-Wai, you're guaranteed to get a beautiful-looking movie. Unfortunately, visual beauty is just about the only thing that "My Blueberry Nights" has to recommend it.
The movie is set in kind of a fantasy version of the United States--a place depicted mostly at nighttime, with neon lights and rain-slicked streets. There are no fast-food restaurants, only homey cafes and juke joints seen near closing time. The citizens are either remarkably beautiful, or else they're crusty character actors like David Strathairn. Everybody enjoys making ponderous pronouncements about love. Nobody has a sense of humor.
The main character of "My Blueberry Nights," Elizabeth (Jones), is poorly conceived. A New Yorker who is suffering from a bad breakup, she decides to leave town and travel cross-country working as a waitress. (This is not how most women behave when broken-hearted. Especially not when a guy who looks like Jude Law is pining away for them back in NYC.) Because we don't sufficiently understand what compelled Elizabeth to go on her road trip, we also don't understand what specific lessons she is supposed to be learning from the people that we see her encounter along the way. And when a character is this hard to understand, it seems unfair to entrust her to an amateur actress like Jones.
Portman has an intriguing role as a young cardsharp that Elizabeth meets in Nevada; and Strathairn finds real pathos in his somewhat stereotypical role, an alcoholic cop in Memphis. Weisz plays Strathairn's unfaithful wife and gets to deliver a long, teary monologue in one take. But this is just another example of the self-indulgence of "My Blueberry Nights": it becomes more about Weisz's acting technique than about her character's predicament.
"My Blueberry Nights" is not a painful viewing experience, and at certain moments, it's even seductive. Still, it's appropriate that its title refers to a dessert, because it's a piece of art-house fluff.
The movie is set in kind of a fantasy version of the United States--a place depicted mostly at nighttime, with neon lights and rain-slicked streets. There are no fast-food restaurants, only homey cafes and juke joints seen near closing time. The citizens are either remarkably beautiful, or else they're crusty character actors like David Strathairn. Everybody enjoys making ponderous pronouncements about love. Nobody has a sense of humor.
The main character of "My Blueberry Nights," Elizabeth (Jones), is poorly conceived. A New Yorker who is suffering from a bad breakup, she decides to leave town and travel cross-country working as a waitress. (This is not how most women behave when broken-hearted. Especially not when a guy who looks like Jude Law is pining away for them back in NYC.) Because we don't sufficiently understand what compelled Elizabeth to go on her road trip, we also don't understand what specific lessons she is supposed to be learning from the people that we see her encounter along the way. And when a character is this hard to understand, it seems unfair to entrust her to an amateur actress like Jones.
Portman has an intriguing role as a young cardsharp that Elizabeth meets in Nevada; and Strathairn finds real pathos in his somewhat stereotypical role, an alcoholic cop in Memphis. Weisz plays Strathairn's unfaithful wife and gets to deliver a long, teary monologue in one take. But this is just another example of the self-indulgence of "My Blueberry Nights": it becomes more about Weisz's acting technique than about her character's predicament.
"My Blueberry Nights" is not a painful viewing experience, and at certain moments, it's even seductive. Still, it's appropriate that its title refers to a dessert, because it's a piece of art-house fluff.