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Dir. Kar Wai Wong
Rating: 3.6 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
By Sam Benesby
Director Kar Wai Wong, in his first American film, wants to tell a formulaic, played-out love story about a heartbroken girl named Elizabeth (Norah Jones) who learns that her boyfriend has been cheating on her. Out of bleary-eyed impulse, she leaves the keys to her boyfriend's apartment with an unrealistically romantic diner owner named Jeremy (Jude Law) who just so happens to collect keys of the broken hearted. Not knowing where to go or who to turn to, she returns to the diner and begins falling for a painfully romantic Brit before suddenly deciding to head west and "find herself" on the road. The premise sounds simple enough, but becomes grossly compromised by improbability, the director's apparent lack of understanding of basic human nature and horrendous acting. On each of Elizabeth's stops, she just so happens to become entangled in situations of love-spawned torment that invariably lead to death. Of course, these unrealistic injections into the story are meant to display the various sufferings caused by love, but instead she comes across as one of the four riders of the apocalypse, a herald of death and misery. Even with a star-studded cast, the film comes off inept and forced, like a play where its unwilling participants are shoved on stage with a cattle prod. "Some things are better on paper,” says Elizabeth, as she writes about her experiences to Jeremy. Well one of those “things” is a script. In the special feature, “Making of My Blueberry Nights," it is revealed that the actors improvised the majority of the dialogue in the film, keeping with Wong’s signature style of having a loosely based script, if any at all. This might have worked with some of the seasoned vets like David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz, but it was painfully clear that this was far too much to ask of newbie Norah Jones. Even the most romantically intended scenes come off awkward and creepy: Jeremy waits until Elizabeth is passed-out drunk on the bar to steal his first kiss. Despite the film's thespian shortcomings, the one redeeming quality remains its sheer visual beauty. Wong and his DP Darius Khondji are able to turn typical scenes of neon Americana into artistic renderings fit for Edward Hopper. All things considered, you might be better off simply flipping through the still-images of the film on the extras menu than suffering through its narrative.
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