Reviewing the Reviewers: My Blueberry Nights
I’ve already described the great pleasure of going into a film that has a bad critical reputation and discovering that the critics got it wrong. For me, this most recently happened with Wong Kar-Wai’s lovely My Blueberry Nights. Currently boasting a lowly 46% Tomato Rating at Rotten Tomatoes and an even lower 29% among the Cream of the Crop, Blueberry turned out to be one of the nicest surprises of the year so far and certainly one of the best movies. To the haters I say: Suck it.
Of course, there’s a flipside to being out in the wilderness on a film; namely the creeping suspicion that the one who missed the boat was you. That feeling started to settle in for me after posting a somewhat giddy review for the world to see. Knowing this, Joel linked me to a pretty terrific appreciation of the film this morning by smartypants Matt Zoller Seitz at The House Next Door. Not only did the film seem to hit Matt in a similar way it hit me, he does a fantastic job of expressing it.
With that in mind, I thought it would be a good time to dust off a semi-regular LiC feature, Reviewing the Reviewers wherein I take a look at films that have received a general critical response wildly different from my own. So far, Lars and the Real Girl, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Juno have all gotten the Reviewing the Reviewers treatment and now it’s time for My Blueberry Nights. We begin with the bad after the jump.
Rex Reed has never been taken seriously as a film critic by anyone who takes film seriously, but he’s often reliable for a funny catty remark or two. This isn’t one of those times.
In a review carrying the unclever title Soggy Pastry, Rex makes it clear from the start he doesn’t like Wong. Likening the director’s recent works to being anesthetized, Reed calls him an “undeserving new critical favorite” when in fact he’s neither new nor undeserving. Then, complaining that My Blueberry Nights doesn’t have a plot, Reed launches into a review padding, spoilerific account of just about everything that happens in the movie. In the end he throws his arms up in surrender saying “My guess is that it’s about people who feel but never articulate, who love but never connect emotionally.” What?? He then finishes off with a bizarre reference (I think) to the Eliot Spitzer scandal. O.K. then.
Next up, the usually more reliable Corina Chocano of the L.A. Times acknowledges reading the signposts that clearly indicate Wong isn’t describing a specific time or place or even a story so much as a state of mind with My Blueberry Nights, but she quickly loses her way, complaining that Elizabeth has no real reason to go to Memphis and that, once she gets there, Memphis isn’t very realistic.
Finally, she pins all her narrative hopes on Elizabeth’s dramatic arc and, when this arc comes up a little short, she misses the proverbial forest for the trees. She doesn’t see that Elizabeth is really just the lens through which the other stories are filtered. The fact that her story is tied up in the end is more of a grace note than the point of the film. It’s simply Wong granting a patient audience a bit of closure.
Ultimately, Chocano concludes, “the use of recognizable movie stars doesn’t help, or serve Wong’s style. My Blueberry Nights should’ve played like a memory, but its hard-living, luckless losers are too beautiful to be believed.” Yeah, because memories are so realistic.
There are many more bad reviews, but most of them seem to serve up the same mixture of boredom and bewilderment or they express frustration that Wong doesn’t seem to be offering anything new here (wrong), so let’s go back to Mr. Zoller Seitz. Instead of rejecting the elusive quality of Wong’s films as a failure, he embraces the vagueness saying, “[Wong] glosses over dramatic housekeeping and fixates on tremors of emotion. His films seem to be struggling to remember themselves.”
Next he crystallizes the musicality of Wong’s work in general and the looseness of My Blueberry Nights specifically: “it’s the directorial equivalent of a musician following up back-to-back marquee performances with an after-hours jam session.” Exactly! He’s conflated two very important points here. My Blueberry Nights is like a song, playing with feeling more than story, and it’s also a freeform jam, eschewing rigorous attention to structure in favor of going with the moment. As such, it might not carry the weight or importance of Wong’s other work, but it’s no less interesting or invigorating.
But Zoller Seitz is just getting warmed up. Next he pretty much nails how Wong works for me:
“To get philosophical for a moment - and it’s Wong, so why not? - let’s assume, as I think Wong does, that there are two realities. One is scientific, logical, mathematical, quantifiable…it’s the world of anniversaries and birthdays and holidays, years and weeks and minutes, latitudes and longitudes, mile markers and return addresses. The other world - internal, emotional; the world behind our eyes and ears - is oblivious to calendars and measurements. It notices what it wants to notice and feels what it wants to feel when it wants to feel it, and ironically - wonderfully - it’s the place where life actually happens to us, the place where we register experience and collect the visceral sensations we call memories. This is the place where all of Wong’s movies take place - thus the willful scrambling, even obliteration, of comprehensible time and space, and the prizing of images, sounds and fleeting emotions over, well, pretty much everything that commercial narrative cinema tells us is important.”
I don’t know what else can be said about it or how better to say it, but sometimes I really wonder whether there’s any poetry left in people’s souls.
Filed under: Opinion
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Two brief thoughts:
Between your own review, Craig, and Matt Zoller Seitz’s over at The House Next Door, I’m determined to give My Blueberry NIghts another viewing very soon. Wong is one of my five or six favorite filmmakers so I was determined to see it again eventually but now I have steely resolve to check it out again as soon as I can fit it in. I never disliked it, just felt letdown. But now I realize that Wong wasn’t ready to hit another grand slam ala 2046, and that My Blueberry Nights is doubtless the foundation for even greater things in the near future.
Rex Reed is an embarrassment. New undeserving critical favorite? I guess Reed couldn’t bother with Wong’s earlier films since, you know, he’d have to read the subtitles and he probably can’t anymore.
Try it on with MZS’s latenight jam session analogy and see if it plays better.
I think my viewing of it benefited from diminished expectations. I’m sure yours were mighty going in.
You’re absolutely right, Craig. I went in like so many critics and Wong fans alike with mighty expectations. I remember there being an almost violent reaction from some people immediately after the film concluded. I defended it a great deal but I had to admit it didn’t entirely work for me, either.
The Cannes reaction from last year was almost inevitable, in retrospect.
Hmm, I can’t read either review yet, but I like the feature. As you know, I was in a similar situation with Stop-Loss, which fared better with critics than MBN, but not as well with the online community, of which I am a part and for which I often care more about.
Speaking of Cannes, Southland Tales is another option in here. I can’t argue on its behalf, but others online seem to be up to it.
You’re right Daniel, it’s one thing disagreeing with the likes of a fossil like Rex Reed, but a little more disconcerting to go against the supposed cool kids.
In the case of Blueberry, the elite critical establishment gave it far worse treatment than the internet riff raff.
RT cream of the crop reviewer - the SF Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle - gave it a positive review. I often don’t agree with the man’s opinions but he makes a nice case for the film’s success ->
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/18/DD46105VIB.DTL&type=movies
I didn’t like the film, but your thoughts on it may inspire me to give it another chance. And I admire the fact that you stand by your opinion when almost everyone else is against the film. I’m the one who thinks “Youth Without Youth” is kinda brilliant. It doesn’t matter how many people tell me it’s terrible, it worked for me. And that’s that.
I like Wong Kar Wai, but I found “My Blueberry Nights” to be a donut that’s missing its cream filling. It’s pretty to look at but ultimately empty and meandering. There are pieces of it I liked, but I didn’t think they added up to any satisfying whole.
It’s not terrible, but it is kind of a mess…even if it is a beautiful mess, it’s still a mess.
Glad it worked for you though, but I can’t agree with your take on it.
Michael Wilmington at MCN who also falls into the critical minority, described the film as “visually stunning, well-written and well-acted”.
He wonders “…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?”
In answer to his own question he notes “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.”
I don’t think it’s a mess at all. I think it’s very consistent.
On what strange planet have I awakened where this and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford gets mixed reviews and that stalker fantasy Forgetting Sarah Marshall gets oceans of love?
Sartre, I don’t normally agree with Mr. Lasalle, but he did a fine job with MBN. Thanks for the link.
I think Willmington is onto something with Cannes as well. On top of that, the cut that played there was 20 minutes longer.
Ari and Matthew, I don’t take issue with people who don’t like the movie exactly, we don’t have to agree on everything, but I do think many of the arguments against the movie show it’s being misunderstood. I get that even under perfect circumstances, it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and that’s cool…but Rex Reed is still a dick :)
KB, you live in Bizzaro world where up is down. Well, I suppose I should reserve judgement until I’ve seen Sarah Marshall…
I still have to wait a litlle while before I see this, but I am pretty sure I will be in the same camp as you Mr. Kennedy. I just know I am going to love it, flaws or not. I just have a feeling. If it turns out that I do not like it, I will be surprised.
Craig,
at least that would explain my general epidemic of light-headedness.
I’m probably going to watch it tonight. I’ll keep the late night jam analogy in mind.
I like being in the minority sometimes, finding something to champion in something that’s being unfairly dismissed, or disagreeing with unanimous praise. It does sometimes make you doubt your critical faculties, but luckily, art isn’t democratic, and the majority doesn’t need to be right. I loved Southland Tales and I thought Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was a mess. What’re you gonna do about it?
;-)
Rex Reed is a joke, agreed. He’s mean and nasty and rarely has anything intelligent to say.
That paragraph you included from Seitz is fantastic - he’s the real deal when it comes to criticism (hope his filmmaking is equally astute). It sheds MBN in a new light for me but, I’m sad to say, doesn’t really address the underlying problem I had with it - the melodrama. I get that Kar-Wai isn’t dealing with ‘reality’ in any typical sense, and that he is crafting a ‘mythical America’ (like you noted in your review). I’m fine with that. But the emotions on display ratchet up on the dial to 8, then 9, then they shoot all the way up to 14, and whether or not we really function like that emotionally at times, none of it registered with me in the slightest. In fact, it annoyed me. I enjoyed two things in this film - the cinematography and Jude Law - and nothing else.
I should write an article sometime about the passionate subjectivity that can enter into film criticism. I felt about “Speed Racer” the same way you felt about MBN - critics be damned, they all got it wrong! But here I’m on the opposite side of the fence, generally agreeing with the majority while an impassioned minority says the rest of us are wrong. Gosh, I love film criticism. :) Fascinating, fascinating stuff.