CinemaRian Blog

Under discussion:

My Blueberry Nights  (2008)

At times, My Blueberry Nights doesn't even seem like a movie.  It reminded my of a first novel by an English major, in love with the tone of their own writing.  Believing that film is a visual medium, I often don't comment much on the script, but I have to say that there's really no way this could have been a good movie.  The screenplay is so stupid and self-consciously arty (is that word?) that no director, not Wong Kar-Wai, not Ingmar Bergman, not Francis Ford Coppola, could have made it work.

That's not to say the only flaw is the script, but we'll get to that later.  The movie is three different stories concerning the wandering Elizabeth (singer Norah Jones in her first movie) who is recovering from a break-up.  She stars in New York, and forges a friendship with Jeremy (Jude Law) a British guy who owns a café.  He falls in love with her, and she gets close to him, but she's not ready to commit.  Although she already has a job, Elizabeth can't sleep at night, so she gets another job as a bartender.  Is she aware that if she really can't sleep, she'd be a hallucinating and dead in about a week?  Anyway, while at the bar, she observes the very end of a breakup between Arnie (David Strathairn, who gives the best performance in the movie) and Lynne (Rachel Weisz).  Heading to Nevada, she makes friends with gambler Leslie (Natalie Portman) who lies a lot.

The movie has an incredible number of obvious stupid metaphors- the blueberry pie of the title, a bar tab, a car.  It also has numerous ridiculous scenes that would never ever happen in real life.  At one point, a character pulls a gun in a bar and threatens to kill someone, and nearly pulls the trigger.  The next day, he's back in the bar as if nothing happened.  Right.  I'd certainly want to come back to that bar with that guy as a patron!

Not only that, but Norah Jones is frankly not a good actress. She doesn't even come off as a professional one, often seeming fake.

This movie is like spending ninety minuets with an overly snobby and pretentious high school student who writes poetry at Starbucks. I was surprised there wasn't an Alanis Morissette song over the credits.

My Blueberry Nights (2007)

Under discussion:

Pilgrimage  (1933)

Joseph McBride, the Ford scholar who does the commentary track on the DVD says that although its not as famous as The Searchers or some of Ford's other films, Pilgrimage  is among the director's best works, and I agree with him.  It is his most emotionally raw film and among his most moving.

The move opens in 1918 in the small town of Three Cedars, Arkansas. Jim Jessop (Norman Foster) is a young man who is having serious problems with his mother, Hannah (Henrietta Crosland).  He wants to get married to Mary (Marian Nixon), move out and get a job, maybe join the Army, but his domineering mother will have none of it.  She wants him to live at home and stay single, presumably forever or at least until she dies.  In short, she refuses to see him as an adult.  After he breaks away and agrees to marry his now pregnant girlfriend anyway, Hannah is incensed and argues that if she cannot have him, no other woman can, so she enlists him in the Army without his knowledge, and he is promptly sent to France, where he's almost immediately killed.  In hatred of her son, the egocentric mother refuses to even acknowledge her grandson and daughter in law.  In 1928, she is petitioned by the government to go on a free trip to France with other mothers of war dead to see her sons, grave, and almost refuses to go, filled with both anger and repressed guilt.

Pilgrimage is a work of great compassion.  It is hard not to hate Hannah Jessop in the earlier parts of the picture, as she ruins her son's life because he dared violate her own ego, but as the film goes on she becomes a sad character, and you feel a mix of anger and sorrow for her position.  Movies did not often features psychologically realistic characters in these days, but Hannah is totally believable person and creation from both Ford and Crosland.  As McBride notes, it's surprising that Crosland didn't win an Oscar. 

This picture is one of the most moving all of Ford's films.  The director could often fall into clichéd, one dimensional heroes and villains, but this is a film about real people and doesn't fall into the director's macho trap.  It's a deeply felt film, just a few notches below The Grapes of Wrath as the director's best.

Pilgrimage (1933)