Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Elizabeth has just been through a particularly nasty breakup, and now she's ready to leave her friends and memories behind as she chases her dreams across the country. In order to support herself on her journey, Elizabeth picks up a series of waitress jobs along the way. As Elizabeth crosses paths with a series of lost souls whose yearnings are even greater than her own, their emotional turmoil ultimately helps her gain a greater understanding of her own problems...
Wong Kar-wai's English-language debut is visually sumptuous — Darius Khondji's cinematography drips with saturated neon and shallow-focus longing, hallmarks of WKW's style translated beautifully to American settings. The cast is game (Norah Jones holds her own, with strong turns from Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Rachel Weisz), but the episodic road-trip plot feels thin and meandering, more a series of mood pieces than a cohesive narrative. The film's novelty lies in its cross-cultural transposition of WKW's romantic melancholy onto Americana, which is interesting but not wholly successful. The ending resolves too neatly and sentimentally for the wistful emotional territory the film inhabits, undercutting the bittersweet ambiguity WKW does best.