Wong Kar Wai first American film is an interesting try by this great director but something gets lost in the translation in terms of narrative and story telling that makes this film a noble and failed attempt by him. The story really does not hold much water in the way it's presented and the narrative feels a bit awkward and unfinished in what's going on right in front of you, not to mention the horrible lines of dialog that comes out of the mouths of most of the characters. Nora Jones does give an interesting first performance and she is quite good but she is blown off the screen by her seasoned co stars who give much more potent performances than the script allows. The best of these performances goes to Rachel Weisz and David Straitharn, who gives much more complexity to their underwritten characters than they should have and if they both had a real script to work with, their story would have been a great movie in itself but the script holds them back like a anchor and you can see that they are trying to keep a straight face while saying some of the lame dialog from the script. Jude Law is really not in the movie much at all and Natalie Portman is the worst served by all of this because despite her up hill battle to give a good performance with how unfocused the script is, she does not have much of a story to work with.
I feel bad for Wong Kar Wai, he could have made a much better film than this, especially with the great talent he had working for him but the script is what killed this film and no amount of great talent could have saved it.
I feel bad for Wong Kar Wai, he could have made a much better film than this, especially with the great talent he had working for him but the script is what killed this film and no amount of great talent could have saved it.