What becomes of the brokenhearted... when they emigrate? Wong Kar-Wai goes in search of America

Strewn throughout My Blueberry Nights are certain carefully chosen mementoes, fetishized objects charged with maintaining the simmering fevers of the brokenhearted, who pretty much constitute the entire populace of this swooning New York to Memphis to Nevada and back road movie, a sort of love letter to American folly and wanderlust that marks the English language debut of beloved Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai. The objects include unclaimed keys, unpaid tabs, poker chips, videotapes and postcards. Each signifies what is very much an idea of longing. I could describe one to you, that is, the idea of one, entirely apart from the context of the movie itself, and you’d likely feel charmed.

Yet the affection bestowed upon these tokens of lost love is indicative of a larger tendency to embrace the flatly tokenistic in My Blueberry Nights, a movie whose characters all seem to be the lovingly contrived product of one or two charming ideas: the cop with the absconded wife he first met when he stopped her for drinking and driving, who now gets drunk every night in celebration of his last night of drinking before driving precariously home; the transplanted Brit who came to the US to run marathons but now just runs an all-night diner; the spunky young gambler who’ll stake everything at the tables but can’t trust her mentor/father enough to believe him when he calls to say he’s dying. This is great raw material for stirring little four-minute soul songs or country songs or Tom Waits songs, but not quite the stuff of richer, more involving movies, of conflicted emotions and accumulated experience transformed into some sort of story that resonates as an impression of life.

My Blueberry Nights debuted at Cannes 2007 to, at best, lukewarm reception. The disappointment was no doubt enhanced by the tremendous praise usually showered upon Wong, whose intoxicatingly melancholy, formally sumptuous In the Mood for Love so dazzled even the most jaded filmlovers—the evidence includes its cracking of the top 20 in filmmaker/critic Paul Schrader’s recent and much-discussed film canon, the only movie from the last 30 years to do so. (And you can read Schrader's remarkable piece on canons here.) As one of his legion of admirers, long before I was able to see it I started to kind of dread My Blueberry Nights, as the notion of a masterful stylist from foreign lands coming to the US to make a mythical American road movie where everything feels like empty kitsch Americana sounded way too much like the formula that’s made legendary German director Wim Wenders’ later work (ie: The End of Violence, The Million Dollar Hotel) so hard to take. (Like Wenders, Wong even uses Ry Cooder as his composer.) I guess I wasn’t alone in this dread, since despite the star power of Jude Law to boost its profile, My Blueberry Nights took a full year after its debut to play theatrically in North America, and died a quick death once it did. It’s now available on DVD, and while some of that dread was merited, while the movie is indeed far from Wong’s best work, it’s hardly as bad as it sounds.

Shot by Darius Khondji, with editing and production design from Wong’s steady William Chang, the movie is above all a wildly beguiling construction of imagery. Wong’s predilection to shoot through mirrors and windows is in full effect, with the heavily etched windows of the Soho diner helmed by Jeremy (Law) functioning as a palimpsest, its abundant neon providing a palate of gorgeously blurred garish colours to play with, colours echoed in the flash cuts to close-ups of melting ice cream streaming rivulets of vanilla through a landscape of gooey purple pie. There are countless couples in My Blueberry Nights, but the only one with any sort of future is the pairing of Jeremy and Elizabeth (singer Norah Jones). The actors don’t exude much chemistry, but Wong conveys their potential romance almost entirely through tableau and montage. It doesn’t completely work, but it is, well, extremely beautiful.

Elizabeth meets Jeremy just as she’s getting ditched by another guy, so whatever desire Jeremy ignites in her is put aside while she takes buses all over America in search of herself… and a car. She works in old man bars, greasy spoons and musty casinos in various locales trying to save up enough bread for some wheels, but the people she meets along the way provide the real mileage, like the aforementioned boozer cop (David Strathairn) and his luscious, reckless ex (Rachel Weisz, a older, sexier, more interesting kind of double for Jones) and the card shark/little girl lost (Natalie Portman). Straitharn and Weisz, superb actors both, are kind of stuck with a storyline that sinks into maudlin theatrics pretty fast, while Portman, blonde, full of sass and vaguely reminiscent of a young Jessica Lange, is actually quite fun in the first part of her episode. It’s too bad that the performance linking them all together is Jones’, whose face just seems too girlish and pouty and whose (over)active listening can get annoying. If Wong’s purpose was to get a unique, textured performance from a young American singer, he might have switched Jones with Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, who besides acting as music supervisor for the movie also enjoys a brief appearance as Jeremy’s ex. I have no idea whether or not Marshall can develop a complex character, but she’s got far more screen presence. 

Co-scripted with crime novelist Lawrence Block, My Blueberry Nights emanates all of the basic elements that make a Wong movie so special, not just with regards to the visual aspects but also his irreverent approach to text (i.e.: tossing it out the window at a moment’s notice) that allows for a more organic-feeling narrative, one encouraged to breathe. The problem arises when these stray elements don’t really add up to something entirely cohesive or emotionally convincing. It would be hugely unadvisable for newcomers to introduce themselves to Wong through this movie, but those already predisposed to his aesthetic should give it a whirl, since for all its flaws it is very much of a piece with his ongoing body of work—which is in itself more cohesive than any single movie enveloped by it.

I Live in Fear: Kurosawa's underrated portrait of a country with better reason to worry than most

Another forgotten work by one of the great auteurs is Akira Kurosawa’s 1955 troubled social portrait I Live in Fear, now available in Eclipse’s Postwar Kurosawa box. As is often the case with Kurosawa, the film has been grossly underrated over the years on account of its didacticism –as though earnestness alone can kill a movie with otherwise compelling, dynamic, chilling and even touching qualities. I propose that I Live in Fear is actually something quite special, rich in atmosphere and in certain regards as revealing of the mood of the mid-50s as, say, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life or Rebel Without a Cause, films that also feature familial disintegration in a milieu of modernity and progress, as well as Cold War apocalyptic paranoia.

Elderly patriarch Kiichi Nakajima, portrayed by a heavily made-up, yet surprisingly effective Toshiro Mifune, is so consumed with anxiety over the seemingly inevitable nuclear holocaust that he’s resolved to move his entire clan –mistresses and illegitimate kids included– to a farm in Brazil, which he considers to be the safest possible locale to avoid fallout or direct attack. More concerned with the destiny of Kiichi’s finances than with the mortal destiny of Japan, the majority of his kin attempt to have a local court deem Kiichi incompetent and thus unfit to invest the family’s collective wealth in this venture that almost none want part of. As it becomes uncomfortably obvious that those pursuing the claim are chiefly concerned with their inheritance, the explosive Kiichi, whose convictions are as well-intentioned as they are impractical, wins the sympathies of one of his jurors, a dentist portrayed by Takashi Shimura, once again playing the reasonable counterpart to Mifune’s unruly protagonist. (The more I watch Shimura in these roles, the more he comes to resemble a Japanese Morgan Freeman. He’s got that aura of wisdom and kindness, yet can readily possess a daunting edge.)

Though sections are admittedly excessively talky, there are numerous scenes in I Live in Fear that, in their blend of sinuous camerawork, striking composition and percolating tension, deserve alignment with Kurosawa’s finest moments. In one, hot wind blows the pages of a book, while streetcars boom along the avenue outside: this “spooky weather,” attributed to H-bomb testing at sea, creates an unnerving air around Kiinchi as he cradles an infant grandchild while a son-in-law, drink in hand, casually goes on about the effects of radiation and the latest research into the ongoing trauma in Hiroshima.

The transfer on Eclipse’s no-frills disc is very good, and I’m grateful to finally have the film available on DVD. My only regret is that Criterion didn’t hold out for a more prestige-packaged release, because Japanese cinema expert Donald Ritchie would likely have provided a stellar commentary track.

Queasy, Cruel, Comic: Margot at the Wedding

Margot at the Wedding is a movie that, above all else, turns on the delicious discomforts of recognition. Recognition of self in family, family in self, and, just as importantly, the lack of any recognition altogether. Discomfort is of course rarely all that delicious in real life, but when sculpted into taut, tense, witty scenarios by writer/director Noah Baumbach, and embodied by the superlative casts he and Douglas Aibel assemble, it can frequently reach queasy, effervescent heights of comic wonder.

The movie begins with successful novelist Margot (Nicole Kidman) wiggling through a corridor on a train leaving her comfort zone of New York City for some island near Long Island. That our titular heroine starts her story in a state of disequilibrium is made complete by the rather ingenious way in which she’s introduced to us: mistaking him for her own teenage son Claude (Zane Pais), she sits beside a complete stranger. Her failure to recognize the hapless, approval-seeking Claude speaks volumes about Margot’s difficulties with and resistance to motherhood, as it does about the sort of humour that Margot at the Wedding runs on. As with Baumbach’s break-out hit The Squid & the Whale, laughs escape from our recognizing the dynamics of dysfunctional families, if not, crucially for the sake of comic surprise, the particularities of the family in question, confirming Tolstoy’s famous line about how all unhappy families are different.

A defining factor in Baumbach’s dissection of family is his emphatic interest in giving his adults very adult stories and his kids stories focused around their eager ambition to penetrate the banal mysteries of adult life. Adults and kids intermingle without having to compromise the overall tone of the movie, which hums along, fuelled by need, injury and the distribution of emotional collateral. With child in tow, though conspicuously sans husband, Margot ostensibly arrives on the quiet island to attend and support the marriage of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to tubby, nervy ex-rocker Malcolm (Jack Black), who she met only recently. Once enveloped by the affluent, small community Margot and Claude are confronted with scenes of sexual and fraternal manipulation and expectation, and in these scenes their disparate age groups become irrelevant. Insecurity becomes an equal opportunity threat to all involved.

Squaring off against sea, shrubs, childhood mementos and a lonely, bare tree, under overcast east coast light rendered with muted beauty by ace cinematographer Harris Savides, Margot and Pauline’s interaction forms a consistent centre to this movie that handles story in the loosest terms it can get away with. Things don’t progress a whole lot in Margot at the Wedding, but the static nature of the drama is engagingly offset by how terrifically funny it all is –and its funny because we keep discovering more and more about how these wildly antagonistic sisters operate. And its hard to imagine this relationship playing as well as it does without one of the most inspired strokes of casting in recent memory.

Kidman and Leigh as sisters still strikes me as an utterly bizarre, unlikely choice, the former actor distinguished by her elegance, taste and understatement, the latter by her ballsy, go-for-broke, sometimes deeply mannered performances. My first thought was: this movie’s not big enough for the two of them. My second was: that’s goddamned brilliant! They’re both so good, so mutually attuned to Baumbach’s style while coming to it from very different sensibilities, that they dangle side by side from this family tree with inspired incongruity: Margot the privately grotesque star of the family, Pauline the more sympathetic, if hopelessly lost black sheep. And when you throw the added wild card of Black into the mix, playing a character that no one, his fiancée included, seems entirely comfortable with, you’ve pretty much sealed the deal as far as comic tension is concerned.

The cruelty that constitutes the stock in trade of Margot never really gets shaken off. Thankfully. But that Margot is such a compulsive bitch most of the time makes her role in the family all the more compelling to work through. Its not just this movie that needs Margot to function, her family needs her too, as a way to reflect back their own weaknesses and conflicted feelings with success as defined by the outside world. And, as jarring as the final gesture made in Margot at the Wedding is, it displays a remarkable flicker of optimism in this mostly nasty, mostly pleasingly shapeless world Baumbach’s created. Out of nowhere, the movie seems to be telling us that we never know when our deeper moral impulses might just leap out, yank us by the lapels, and force us to live up to something better than our conditions promise.