Davin Lacksonen
I love a good love story. And even if this isn’t really anyone else’s favorite Wong Kar-Wai film, it is most certainly mine. I love it because although it is a love story, much of the film is devoted to the pain of failed relationships, which creates a powerful depiction of earnestness of a potentially working one. Everyone has faults and My Blueberry Nights doesn’t show imperfection compared to perfection; it shows the transformative beauty of accepting imperfection. And in that is a darkly emotional love story.
A torn up twenty-something names Lizzie (Norah Jones) calls a restaraunt desperately trying to find out if her ex has been there. The owner, Jeremy (Jude Law) reports that he has, with a woman in fact. This causes Lizzie to break down and complain about relationships. Jeremy is an emotionally seasoned man who has not just his own pain behind him, but a jar filled with keys left by all the pain he’s seen in his customers. Lizzie joins the customers. She comes the cafe every night to eat a slice of blueberry pie, the least popular item in the store. Perhaps she believes that if she eats that blueberry pie, maybe there’s someone out there for everyone.
The seeds of love are planted between Jeremy and Lizzie. But one night Lizzie just disappears. She needs to escape her past before she can find her present. But that present waits patiently for her, like her slice of blueberry pie. In the meantime she goes on a road trip, waitressing in various parts of the country trying to get enough money for a car. In each place she sees failed relationships fall to the bottomless pit of death, literally. We never find out exactly what her own history is. But we get the sense that she is profoundly influenced by these depictions. Perhaps most influenced by the fact that in both cases, the relationships could have been repaired.
In Tennessee she sees an old, broken down alcoholic of a police officer named Arnie (David Strathairn). His relationship predicament closely paralels Lizzie’s: he has been left by his wife, but he desperately wants to maintain that she is still his wife. She is emotionally moved on. This dysfunctionality destroys them both. Arnie is kind to her, perhaps in a desperately flirtatious way, perhaps in a sincerely understanding way. His situation is more serious than hers, which helps her put her own relationship in perspective as Arnie’s wife eventually does when they have their final showdown. There is a moment of tragic understanding which we, the audience, can only imagine that Lizzie can identify with.
The other significant encounter that Lizzie has on her cross-country voyage is in Las Vegas. It starts a little earlier in a small town where Lizzie works as the waitress in a venue open to some small-time serious gambling. One woman, named Leslie loses out on a game of Poker and asks Lizzie bail her out on the condition that if her gambled money is lost, she gets Leslie’s car. Lizzie agrees. They end up travelling to Las Vegas together where Leslie inevitably seeks to continue her illustrious gambling career. In the process of making this journey it becomes apparent that Leslie has some daddy issues. Without becoming overtly freudian, the film tightly navigates this path to a touching ode to the power of trust, an ironic ode for a vignette about a gambler.
Just as Norah Jones’ song lyrics echo in the film’s framing device “so it goes the stories have all been told.” All stories contain pain. Just as Lizzie can identify with Arnie, and just like Lizze’s shared understanding of pain with Jeremy, each key in the jar is another identical story of pain. Perhaps the stories are different, but pain is universal. And that is where the real story lies.
My Blueberry Nights does not feature any single great performance, nor any great scene or great lines. But it is a great film. It flows through it’s narrative smoothly and seemingly without direction, only to wind up right where it began. Something about that rings fundametntally true to me.
Even though the film starts and ends at the same point, we know that something is changed. Jeremy comments that Lizzie seems different. And she is. You can’t put into words the change that has occurred. She is calmer, sure. But that is only the superficial display of her change. What goes on beneath the surface is not specifically clear. But we feel it with her, each step of the way. And in the final frames of the film, after all the movement stops, we know the characters are in the right place.
Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 11:07 am
A lovely write-up on potentially Wong Kar-Wai’s most under-appreciated movie. I’ll admit this one does rank somewhat low in the WKW pecking order for me, but that speaks more to the quality of the movies in the director’s oeuvre than it does the flaws in this film (it’s certainly not perfect, but your interpretation of that imperfection is insired). The hate is admittedly a bit lost on me.
I think Leslie was my favorite character, and that Natalie Portman gives probably the best performance in the movie (I liked Strathairn as well, for the reasons you pointed out – but loved Rachel Weisz a lot less than I usually do). I do wish Nora Jones was a little bit less of a blank slate, because I do think the vagueness of her character diminished my ability to connect with the movie as emotionally as I did with ’2046′ or ‘In the Mood for Love,’ but stylistically and rhythmically, I do think the movie ultimately works pretty well.