Noted director Wong Kar Wai directs this English-language effort about a heartbroken woman who hits the road in search of personal meaning. Norah Jones takes on the lead, but the jazzy singer doesn’t have enough dramatic depth to keep the internal tension taut, and while the supporting cast that includes Jude Law and Natalie Portman have plenty of depth, they don’t have the material — making for an uneven and unsatisfying voyage.

Starring: Jude Law, Norah Jones, David Strathairn, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz.
Directed by Wong Kar Wai
Parental advisory: Coarse language, violence
Rating: Parental guidance
Running time: 96 minutes
Rating: Two stars out of five

There’s no doubt Shanghai director Wong Kar Wai has a unique film style that’s created some cutting-edge films over the past decade, but Blueberry Nights isn’t one of them.

A stylish but finally unsatisfying story of lost souls, My Blueberry Nights features singer Norah Jones as Liz, a young woman who walks into a cafe with a broken heart, and leaves the keys to her boyfriend’s apartment with Jeremy (Jude Law), the man behind the lunch counter.

Jeremy and Liz end up talking late into the evening about their unrealized dreams and personal failures, an idea embodied in the symbol of Jeremy’s blueberry pie: every day he makes a blueberry pie, and every night, he’s forced to throw it away because no one eats it.

Liz feels a sudden burst of sympathy for the unwanted pie, and shovels a big slice down her gullet before the two eventually part.

It’s just a chance meeting, but anyone familiar with Wong’s earlier work such as Happy Together or In the Mood for Love will recognize the importance of random occurrence in his oeuvre and see that one night as the launch pad for a series of similarly themed events.

Feeling burned by her bad love affair, Liz heads out on the road to discover a different side of herself. She ends up landing jobs in a series of diners and bars, where she hooks up with a variety of characters — all suffering from a similar ailment: a pronounced lack of love and personal meaning.

There’s Arnie Copeland (David Strathairn), an alcoholic cop abandoned by his true love Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz). We also meet Leslie (Natalie Portman), a young gambling addict with unresolved father issues.

As Liz befriends these various characters, she tries on a new name — various versions of the name Elizabeth, including Beth and Lizzie. She also tries on new elements of her growing persona.

During all this time, she maintains a post card correspondence with Jeremy, who’s become obsessed with finding the girl who ate his blueberry pie.

One gets the impression this is all supposed to be very romantic if we’re to take our cue from the many close-ups of Norah Jones’s mouth and the slow-motion parting of her plump lips and the many dreamy gazes out the window.

Yet, it’s not romance that wafts between the frames of this story so much as melancholy.

Whether it’s a result of Jones’s performance, which feels like a run-on sentence without dramatic punctuation, or the cliched elements of Wong’s script, penned with the help of Lawrence Block, the movie shudders between moments of pretentious tedium and scenes that are so hackneyed, you almost feel embarrassed for the actors.

David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz are easily two of the most talented actors working today, and yet over the course of this ambitious picture they almost verge on amateurish because the material is so weak.

You can’t blame them. After all, how does one reinvent a scene single-handedly when every single piece of the mise-en-scene — from the bar stools to the dialogue read as cliche?

The actors give it their best go, but not even Natalie Portman or Jude Law prove powerful enough to rise above the sappy surface of Blueberry Nights.

A frustrating effort from a filmmaker who’s usually unafraid of taking significant risks and creating impressions instead of narrative pictures, My Blueberry Nights may well suffer the same fate as its fictional inspiration and remain one of Wong’s lesser-sampled concoctions.