READ MORE: Cannes Q&A with Norah Jones and Wong Kar Wai

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/31/08)

In his last two features, 2000's exquisite In The Mood For Love and 2004's trickier but equally ravishing 2046, Hong Kong maestro Wong Kar Wai mixed his ever-more-deft space/time manipulations with ever-deeper contemplations of the vicissitudes of romantic love. The results were movie romances like no other, heartbreak trips that seduced the eyes and ears, wrenched the heart and dizzied the intellect. My Blueberry Nights, Wong's first English-language, United States-shot film doesn't have the same loopy ambition as the sci-fi inflected 2046, but unfortunately, it doesn't have anything like that film's assurance, either. Instead, Wong falls into many of the traps foreign-language directors are prone to in the U.S., most notably a tin ear for American English dialogue.

The first minutes of the picture offer no such concerns, as they are wordless, and taken up with yummy-looking close-ups of vanilla ice cream melting into a slice of blueberry pie. Cinematographer Darius Khondji is clearly simpatico with Wong's palette, which often falls into a category I'll call Neon Impressionist. But the problems begin whenever anybody opens a mouth. The first of the stars to do so are Jones and Law. Law plays an expat who runs a cozy, cluttered Manhattan diner, where Jones seeks refuge after a breakup. (It's said diner's blueberry pie that inspires the picture's title.) I'm not sure what Wong was looking for when he cast jazzy singer (and much-bruited non-actor) Jones in the lead of this picture, but if it was the voluptuous-but-ethereal persona of her music, album artwork and videos, he didn't get that. This Jones is a little harder-edged, sometimes even querulous, and I suspect the character took shape around something like the "real" Jones during the shoot. This is not a problem in and of itself; the problem is when anybody in the cast enunciates the numerous platitudes about love and self and travel and absence that constitute much of the dialogue. Jones' first foray into the diner occurs when she wants to claim a set of keys she believes were left there by her ex, and this situation gives way to the observation, "Even if you have the right key, the door won't always open."

I'm not sure which of the film's co-screenwriters, Wong himself or the American crime writer Lawrence Block, is responsible for the string of fortune cookie-ish aphorisms that bedazzle this road trip. But they're groan-worthy, as are a few of Wong's received ideas about what contemporary America looks like. When Jones' Elizabeth ventures below the Mason-Dixon on a voyage of what-have-you, she gets a gig tending bar and involves herself in the lives of an alcoholic sheriff named Arnie (Strathairn) and his fed-up quasi-floozy wife, Sue Lynne (Weisz). Sue Lynne's got herself another fella, a guy who leans up against his red convertible wearing a cowboy hat and shades. He might have a toothpick in his mouth as well, I don't recall. Wong frames this particular image as if he's capturing a moment of genuine Americana; one of his five fellow producers could have done him a favor and pointed out that all he was evoking was a car commercial. "I'm gonna git me a job," Sue Lynne drawls at one point, evoking maybe The Beverly Hillbillies.

All this is frustrating, as the picture contains a few grace notes that remind one what an acute filmmaker Wong can be. Strathairn's character is something of a commonplace, but the actor and Wong's camera conspire to make him something of a Wongian archetype — the male lover wrecked by his own failings and caught in a web of memory. And while Wong's application of his style to an American landscape underscores just how many commercial and video directors have been biting his style over the past 15 or so years — e.g., you've seen a lot of this stuff before — now and again he hits on something new and startling. One hopes that, having possibly purged his romanticized preconceptions about the U.S., Wong comes back sometime, gets comfortable with his setting, and forges a unique vision.

— Glenn Kenny