..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

My Blueberry
Nights
Plus Ratings Of This Week's DVDs

My Blueberry Nights is a sweet little romance and a jazzy film reverie that, at its best, wafts you back to the heyday and mood of the American maverick cinema of the 70s, a great era that many of us miss.
    
The movie -- which marks the American directorial debut of the much-admired Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai (maker of Ashes of Time and In the Mood for Love) and the film acting debut of Grammy winning singer-composer Norah Jones -- is visually stunning, well-written and well-acted, by a cast that also includes Jude Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, Frankie Faison and (in one of her best screen performances) Natalie Portman.

Why then, is My Blueberry Nights being treated so shabbily by a number of my fellow American critics, attacked as if it were not just a failure, but some kind of ill-conceived embarrassment? Maybe you couldn't expect consistent praise for a movie this offbeat, but does it deserve abuse or ridicule?

I wasn't at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where My Blueberry Nights was the opening night film, but it's obvious some reservoir of critical ill will built up there around the picture and hasn't let up. Yet ironically, My Blueberry Nights is exactly the kind of movie that critics should feel sympathy toward, a show whose sins -- not egregious -- they should tend to forgive, and whose achievements and promise they should recognize and even encourage. It might have been better for Wong if his movie hadn't been chosen for that high-profile opening night Cannes slot, which may have set it up for a fall.
    
But you can see why it was picked. My Blueberry Nights -- intellectual, erotic and physically sumptuous -- is an unabashed romance, for grownups, about a young woman in New York, Elizabeth (played by Jones, the subject of much of the abuse). Dumped by her faithless boyfriend, she then takes off on a cross county ramble to reawaken her heart.
    
Liz's timing is strange. Before she leaves New York, she meets the most likely candidate for an instant romantic replacement, Jude Law's kindly Brit café-owner Jeremy. Jeremy runs an all-night coffee shop and is instantly smitten; he feeds her blueberry pie a la mode and kisses her as she slumbers at his counter. But Liz, seemingly oblivious, leaves him to embark on the trek that takes her to Memphis and Las Vegas -- and then keeps sending him back postcards with no return address.
   
In both Liz's stops, Memphis the grand urban hillbilly habitat of Elvis, and Las Vegas the neon swingers' paradise of Frankie and Dino, she meets two tough female lookers, Sue Lynne (Weisz) and Leslie (Portman), who, unlike Liz, don't let men victimize them. In Memphis, where Liz works as a waitress by day and a bartender by night, she pours the beer for a sad alcoholic ex-cop, Arnie (Strathairn), who's obsessed with smoky Sue Lynne, his own bed-hopping mate and the kind of likable slut who fatally attracts good, weak men. She's ditched Arnie for some local stud/jerks and keeps dangerously flaunting them before his sodden, begging eyes.
    
Afterward, on the road to Vegas, Elizabeth becomes temporary best pals with the second hard lady on her travels: Leslie (Portman), a silver-haired pixie blonde in short-shorts with a wicked smile, who plays a mean hand of poker, and beats the boys at their own game. Leslie has problems with her dying father though, and, as she hooks onto Lizzie, exploits her and teaches her a little about poker and deception, Portman injects infectious high spirits and sexy abandon into the entire movie.
    
Both these women demonstrate the drawbacks of a cold, cold heart -- and Arnie shows us the perils of a heart too full. Meanwhile, Jeremy has obviously fallen in love with Liz even more in absentia. It's the kind of thwarted or star-crossed amour on which Wong thrives.

We don't worry very much about whether they'll meet again or share more pie a la mode. (That may be one reason the movie is disliked.) 
    
But Wong, as before, is adept at conveying longing, obsession and the agonies of unrequited love (Arnie's or, for a while, Jeremy's). True, Elizabeth doesn't have the burning intensity or sexy presence of either Sue Lynne or Leslie -- but, even though she seems a less interesting person, I didn't hold it against her or the actress, Jones, who plays her. People who are too interesting or too colorful can break your heart, as we see.
    
The movie, as you'd expect, is ravishing to look at and a delight to listen to. Ry Cooder composed the score, Darius Khondji photographed the people and places , and Wong and his cast and crew concoct another of his blissful romantic dreams. Sadly, this film's detractors have blasted him for his visual lushness as well, as if all the ways he can make an ordinary everyday locale, like the café in Chungking Express, look rapturous, were some kind of cheap trick covering shoddy goods.
     
I don't agree. The script, which smartly taps the classic American noir vein, is a smart, agile romance set in a tangibly stylized hard-boiled urban milieu and Wong's co writer is the sharp-talking, prolific American crime writer Lawrence Block (8 Million Ways to Die). In a way Wong's and Block's characters are all noir archetypes. Elizabeth is the good, loving girl manhandled by a cad; Sue Lynne and Leslie are a pair of femme fatales, brunette and blonde; Arnie is a flawed lawman/author surrogate (Block's most famous character is the alcoholic private eye, Matt Scudder) and Jeremy is a nice guy denizen of the night, one of those friendly gabby countermen popping up in film noirs from The Killers on.
      
The archetypes are there for structure and melody; this is a film that, despite its drenching romanticism, can feel as real as a slap. The section with Arnie and Sue Lynne, mostly set in the bar where Elizabeth serves and Arnie always claims it's his last night of booze, is a shatteringly good rendition of jealousy and obsession. For everyone who thinks it a cliché, I can only say, I know these people, I know these feelings. Arnie's fall may be the movie equivalent of a torch song on a jukebox, but like "I've Lost You," "The Tracks of My Tears" or "One for My Baby," it hits to the heart.
     
As for the section with Portman as the saucy little gambling ace Leslie -- a heart and ball breaker who grins when she shoots down her poker opponents, you only have to compare her scenes to similar ones in the recent films like Lucky You or the upcoming Deal to see how much better written it is, and how wonderfully Portman inhabits Leslie. Wong doesn't just love his good characters; he loves the bad ones too (perhaps even more). He can get sympathy not just for the victims like Elizabeth and Arnie, or the nice guys like Jeremy, but for the cheats and the bullies, like Sue Lynne and Leslie -- for the sinners, if not for their sins.
       
This movie, like some of the road movie masterpieces of the late '60s and '70s (Five Easy Pieces, The Rain People, Scarecrow, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore) throbs with passion and compassion -- another reason we should be kinder to it.
     
Perhaps there's some inevitability in My Blueberry Night's lousy reception. Foreign directors with big art house reputations sometimes get trashed if they try to make American or English language movies, even though immigrant foreign language auteurs very often became the glory of the old and new Hollywood (from Lubitsch, Lang, Murnau, Renoir, Wilder, Ophuls, Curtiz and Preminger, to Milos Forman and Ang Lee). Ingmar Bergman's English language The Touch, was mercilessly trashed in 1970 and it's very close to being a great film -- and badly handled also was Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 Zabriskie Point. (Zabriskie Point has two poor, awkward actors in the leads, but it's still a beauty of a movie.)
     
Similarly, pictures like My Blueberry Nights, which stir such high expectations, may then get knocked down far more than they deserve. We would all have been better off if The Touch had been more sensitively and sympathetically received on its 1971 release -- or if later Ingmar Bergman had emigrated here, instead of moving to another purgatory in Germany, when his tax problems drove him temporarily out of Sweden. Antonioni also should have made more American movies, just as Paul Verhoeven should have probably made less.
      
And our movie going lives would certainly improve if we got more American examples of Wong Kar Wai's cinematic brilliance and kooky fascination with our culture. (Remember the transcendent "California Dreaming" boogies in his lithe Hong Kong romance Chungking Express?) My Blueberry Nights isn't a great American movie. But it's the work of someone who may very well make one, if we give him the chance.
 
MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS (Three stars)
Directed by Wong Kar Wai; written by Wong & Lawrence Block; story by Wong; cinematography by Darius Khondji; editor and production designer William Chang Suk Ping; music by Ry Cooder; produced by Jacky Pang, Yee Wah.
Elizabeth……. Norah Jones
Jeremy…..Jude Law
Arnie…..David Strathairn
Sue Lynne…..Rachel Weisz
Katya…..Chan Marshall
Travis……Frankie Faison

 
WILMINGTON ON DVD
 
PICKS OF THE WEEK

NEW
..... Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (B+)
..... U.S.; Sidney Lumet, 2007 (ThinkFilm)
CLASSIC
..... Lawrence of Arabia (Collector's Edition) (A)
..... U.S.-U.K.; David Lean, 1962 (Columbia)
BOX SET
..... The Adams Chronicles (B)
..... U.S.; Various directors, 1976 (Acorn Media)

ALSO RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK

Juno (B)
U.S.; Jason Reitman, 2007 (Fox)
Blast of Silence (B+)
U.S.; Allen Baron, 1961 (Criterion)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (A)
U.S.; David Lean, 1957 (Columbia)
A Passage to India (B+)
U.S.-U.K.; David Lean, 1984 (Columbia)
Bamako (B)
Mali/France; Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006 (New Yorker)

RECENT RELEASES

There Will Be Blood (A)
U.S.; Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007 (Miramax/Paramount)
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (A-)
U.S/; Terry Gilliam, 1987 ( )
Sweeney Todd (B+)
U.S.; Tim Burton, 2007 (Warner)
The Night of the Shooting Stars (A)
Italy: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1982 (Koch Lorber)

Box Set: Bette Davis Collection (B)
U.S.-U.K.; Various directors, 1950-65 (Fox)
This set includes: All About Eve (2 disc collector's edition) (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950) (A); Phone Call from a Stranger (Jean Negulesco, 1952); (B-); The Virgin Queen (Henry Koster, 1955) (B-); Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Robert Aldrich, 1964) (B), The Nanny (U.K.; Seth Holt, 1965) (B-).
Extras: Commentaries by Chris Mankiewicz (Joe's son) others; isolated score; vintage newsreels and Oscar broadcast; Bruce Dern interview; AMC Backstory; documentaries, featurettes, trailers.

- Michael Wilmington
April 17, 2008

April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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