It starts with pop star turned movie icon of unfulfillment Norah Jones, crashing into a diner run by Jude Law's transplanted Englishman, Jeremy -- counterman, night manager, waiter, cashier and short order specialist. He doesn't know quite what to whip up to ease Jones's heartbreak as Elizabeth, whose love affair with a neighborhood guy has thudded to an end. Hurt, angry, stymied, she shows up night after night, unable to keep from staring into the window of his upper story apartment across the street, asking the aproned bloke if her lover has been in lately. Always the answer is no. Finally, she leaves the key to his apartment, whereupon the obliging Jeremy drops it into a fishbowl full of other keys awaiting claimants. There may or may not be a million stories in The Naked City, but there are lots of keys in that fishbowl overflowing with connections broken or not made. It is only then that we notice the restaurant's name, painted in Cyrillic letters on the window, is (forgive the English transliteration) Klyootch the Russian word for key.
Law's simpatico Jeremy offers her the pick of the menu, including its array of pies. Cherry and apple always sell, he says, but, in a cityscape of loneliness, nobody ever goes for the blueberry (metaphor alert!). He himself favors lemon meringue, which he eats with a soupspoon from its tin pie plate. She's not interested in food, though. Or the riot of neon lighting that sometimes makes the film seem to be photographed through Popsicles. Or the heavily inscribed window, with its painted-on decorations and recommended house specialties, that sometimes makes it difficult to see the actors when the camera remains outside, filming in. She's too bummed. Either not noticing, or unable to respond to his obviously more than casually friendly interest, she splits. But she doesn't wipe him entirely off her screen. She sends him postcards from the road, and from the two places she stops at Memphis, Tennessee, and the arid gambling-covered sands between Ely, Nevada, and Las Vegas. Each time he gets a card, he tries to reach her by phone, but can't connect.
For a pop singer, Jones is surprisingly affectless, perhaps not inappropriate in an emotionally bruised character, perhaps explaining why she attracts other hurting souls along her way. In Memphis, her pain vibes attract David Straithairn's numbed-out cop, running up a three-figure tab at the bar she tends. He's trying to blur this pain stabbing him since the walkout of his wife (Rachel Weisz), who felt he was smothering her with the possessiveness that went hand-in-hand with his obsessive love. At the same time, he's locked into denial, desperately clinging to the belief that she'll come back to him. As she reiterates when she confrontationally re-injects herself into his bar time, this isn't going to happen. Sadistically, she flaunts the new young buck she's going with, to say nothing of the muscle car he drives. Or maybe it's just her own desperate need to make clear to him that she has really cut loose. Weisz's volatile character, straight from Tennessee Williams country, is a loose cannon. He's a ticking bomb. You know it'll end in tears, that both will in some way bounce off Elizabeth, who's taking it all in.
Until she skedaddles for Nevada. There, accosted by Natalie Portman's professional gambler, she stakes the latter with her savings stash after the cards fall badly on one high-stakes night. Of course, the card table isn't the only high-stakes arena in the gambling lady's life. After she hooks up with Elizabeth, and they become partners, with Elizabeth gambling that she'll get her savings back, it becomes apparent on the desert road to Las Vegas that some open-heart surgery, emotionally speaking, is in the cards for Portman's cowgirl. Paradoxically, although she encounters the ache of unreciprocated love wherever she goes, time seems to have a healing effect on Elizabeth's blues. Maybe it's Ry Cooder's music. The guy never writes stuff to which you don't respond.
Wong has described what for him was the pleasure of trying an American road movie. Certainly, it covers a lot of miles on the map, but the distance is more emotional and internal than geographical. All the more so after we glimpse Straithairn's cop eating his heart out on his bar stool and realize he's a sort of emotional reiteration of Law's counterman desperately trying to fan each postcard from Elizabeth into a small emotional flame. There's no escaping the conclusion that the wispiness of the story makes Wong's latest study in romantic yearning a minor film in a minor key. But it's spiced by the fact that he subverts at least one cliché of the road movie by making the women the ones traveling down their respective roads while the guys sit around immobilized, hoping they'll return. And, gender reversal aside, you want to kick your shoes off and run barefoot through the film's luxuriant textures. Pain has never looked more lush.
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by Jay Carr
