My Blueberry Nights

two stars

Starring Norah Jones, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, and David Strathairn. Directed by Wong Kar Wai. 111 minutes

When her boyfriend's affection for her falters, Elizabeth (Norah Jones) seeks guidance from café owner Jeremy (Jude Law). Over leftover pie and mutual nosebleeds – one of the film's nicer touches – Jeremy consoles her, falls for her and kiss rapes her while she sleeps. All this takes place just in time for Elizabeth to realize she needs to put physical distance between herself and her past relationship.

Wide-eyed Elizabeth abandons New York for nowhere in particular, finding herself first in Memphis, where she meets a host of one-dimensional characters. First up is alcoholic Arnie (David Strathairn) and the wife who left him, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz). A quick suicide, some tears, and it's off to a casino out west, where Elizabeth meets Leslie (Natalie Portman), a wily gambler incapable of trusting even her father. Elizabeth's journey of self-discovery turns to self-satisfaction as she congratulates herself on her unwavering trust in others, and heads home into Jeremy's open arms.

Road movies typically rely on the development of strong central characters who, like an unbroken stretch of tarmac, carry the plot forward and connect the disparate events on their journeys. Unfortunately, Elizabeth is such a bland creation that she seems to simply materialize in different locations, before quickly fading into the background. Her presence and the cliché-heavy postcards she writes to Jeremy (and narrates at us) fail to link the subplots, leaving events at each unwittingly Americana-kitsch location to stand on their own. Except they don't, collapsing instead under the emotional weight they are too underdeveloped to support.

My Blueberry Nights is further soured by the vast potential the film fails to realize. The cast is as star-studded as a Shanghai girl's jeans and, forgiving his overuse of a cheesy low frame-rate blur, Wong's shots create genuine intimacy. Unfortunately this just emphasizes dialogue that emerges stillborn, even from the lips of perfectly capable actors (Portman's exuberance, at least, emerges in tact).

As for the lead, Norah Jones the actor is a lot like Norah Jones the singer: her role is so lacking in range and intensity that it's hard to fault her. Instead, point fingers at a script that lacks cohesion and is devoid of genuine drama.