George Miller and The Hoping For Longing (Patreon)

Talking about movies has to come from a place of love. Otherwise, it just devolves into theater. Or sport. Or even stand-up. There’s nothing wrong with dalliances in those elements, or even diving in for full stretches. After all, criticism should engage the reader. But if all that becomes the sole focus of the dialogue? It just becomes too easy to look at this thing, that is the end work of cinema, and see it as just that: a thing. An innocuous thing. A thing that is easy to ridicule and ultimately, to see oneself as being inherently above it. And all this denies the simple reality that movies are often the products of hundreds and hundreds of artists and craftspeople, all doing a collective thousands of hours of work, all united to the single purpose of genuinely trying their damndest to entertain you. All to get you to engage you in the simple act of spending a couple hours outside of yourself - and maybe even bring you deeper into yourself, too.

But wait, isn’t that a little flowery? Isn’t this just like any other business? One where you are asking people to spend their hard earned money? Doesn’t it make sense to be more discerning about the soulless treacle that often gets pushed out by the capitalist machine? I guess, but there’s this part of me that genuinely doesn’t think so. Because other businesses have profit margins that, you know, actually make sense. Along with products that offer more tangible, practical gains. Yet we all flock to storytelling because it offers something far more ethereal. Especially the act of going to the movies. Maybe it’s just bullshit esteem, but at the center of both their creation and the observation of them, there is this inherent belief that fuels their very existence. An aim of emotional transcendence. An aim to elicit joy, laughter, fear, or even pathos. And the thing that we all hope is that all these aims will be met every time we sit down. We want all parties involved to be given “their hearts desire” as it were…

But hope is a weird thing in criticism. Because it often seems like it is far too easy for our hopes to become dashed. For the latest entry of X movie series or for X director to not deliver on what we so primally want. It is as if all movies are duty bound to recapture the mystical allure of that which was lost in our youth. Thus, perhaps we are best served as audience members by having a quiet hope. A curiosity about them. A zen attitude with which to enter with zero expectations. An understanding that it need not be good to justify our attendance. So that we can best accept and meet a picture where it is, wherever that may be… Again, I know this is a lot of flowery build-up. Just as I know I tend to fall back on these kinds of general reminders or musings when I’m about to talk about a movie in less than glowing terms. So yes, the reason I say all this is because I went by myself late on a Thursday night to go see George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing and against some kinds of hope, I’m left with a confused mix of feelings that are seemingly at odds.

It perhaps starts with the fact that I think George Miller is responsible for some of the best works of cinema, period. While Mad Max: Fury Road cemented him into some sort of god-like status (which is rarely a good thing for anyone), he was pumping them out long before that. Not just with the unhinged carnage of the Mad Max films, but the two Babe films are stone-cold classics (I know he only officially directed the latter). And heck, I’ll happily go to bat for Happy Feet 2, for both family film sequels seem to understand the victories of discovering selfhood in the first movies pale in comparison to the struggles of just living that get explored in these new stories. The emotional ambition of them is incomparable. Miller’s just a special storyteller, dammit. A gift. And so I admit that despite keeping some zen about me as best I could, I was secretly hoping against hope that film would be great. That somehow, all the hemming and hawing and silence that came after the Cannes reaction was misplaced. That there was just another popular misunderstanding like what happened with some of his previous works. And that this wonderful, great film would reveal itself to us in watching…

Instead, I mostly discovered why it was so confounding?

To be clear, I think the film is well-intentioned in some ways. I also think it is ambitious. I mean, who else gets to make 60 million dollar meditations on storytelling, myth, love, tragedy, and the making of peace with these emotions when set against the ravages of time? For this, and this alone, it will be worth the price of admission for some folks. But in execution, it feels like study in errant contradictions - some with purpose - some not. And thus it can’t help but feel like something that fails to actually deliver on the promise of all that essential, powerful subject matter it alludes to.

It perhaps starts with the errant belief that you are in for some high octane, high energy film. Do not get me wrong, you certainly get those filmmaking flourishes; the uncanny moments and visions that feel like they could only come from someone unrestrained like Miller, along with a constant parade of competent shots and arrangements that guide your eye with seeming ease. He’s the kind of director who can communicate so much about dynamics between two characters as they sit around in bathrobes… Which is really important, because that’s a good deal of what the film is. Yes, we genuinely spend most of the running time listening to two characters communicate and tell each other their stories, sometimes in a way that feels intimate, but often in a way that feels impersonal, or even oddly pedestrian. As straight as it aims, only rarely do you feel like the storytelling of this film is cresting the wave into some kind of point - or even catharsis. Even when it gets close to the apparent climax, the film then seems so determined to let the air out of the final third (we’ll come back to this). Thus, we are only left to muse on the film’s many thematic observations about story, culture, and the possible trickery therein. But so many of these observations feel like the introductory thesis to something I want a story to be about. To be brought to life through drama, but instead we just get these streams of surface generalizations. And unfortunately, there’s one surface element that lingers more than others…

Because even engaging with this movie means tapping into an inescapable conversation about Orientalism, specifically with regards Middle Eastern culture. Which is obviously hard for someone like me to parse with either specificity or acumen - and it unfortunately feels like the same is true for Miller? The film is clearly inspired by the classic work of 1001 Nights (often known in English speaking countries as Arabian Nights), which most people know through the uber popularity (and bastardization) of one of the stories with Disney’s Aladdin. But Miller’s film, which is based on a book I never read, seems to be offering a mediation on those stories and in bringing its own three stories to life, It feels… researched, I supposed? I honestly don’t know what to say. I acknowledge there’s just not a lot of film’s interested in Suleiman poetry, let alone hierarchy of his family, but here we are. And while there doesn’t seem to be any real intended malice here, there’s this inescapable feeling in the air. It regards middle eastern culture, much like her character, in this studied and academic way, but weirdly not introspective about said diving beyond the surface of mysticism. And thus, the massive elephant in the room that is colonialism - and all that she embodies through it - lies largely untouched.

Which makes it all the more jarring when the story comes back to England and it suddenly clunks right into a screed against basic bigotry? Seemingly cured by food and a chance to ogle Idris? (which oofa doofa). But is that honestly all it really has to say about modern whiteness for a film that is begging to unpack this stuff? Again, I’m kind of flummoxed more than anything. There are so many other things it notes about modernity and yet so many things just feel like an extension of the same orientalism. Especially on the front of whether or not the story has any kind of extended thought about whether or not it’s fetishizing its core subject of Idris / The Djinn. How are we gazing at him? Is he gazing back? More pointedly, does the film have anything to offer more than those same simple questions? Again, I’m stuck in the contradictions. Even with smaller things, like how a certain segment at first seems loving of body types not often shown on screen, all before the moment where it is most definitely not loving. This all perhaps leads to the contradiction of the film’s storytelling in and of itself.

Perhaps Miller’s use of big, broad archetypes plays seamlessly into, say, a tense action film built around an apocalyptic car chase. But when two characters sit down and talk about those same ideas broadly in general myth?  As if to sit down and actually say “the vulvani represent a matriarchy and…” so on and so forth. Then you feel the clunk. I suppose there’s something admirable about the forthrightness of it all, but it's the thing that can’t help but leave me feeling the most hung up about the film’s approach. For a story about a literal narrative-ologist, there is so little that feels like a narrative in the macro. It just zooms in on the telling, telling, and telling of the Djinn’s story. And as much as Idris Elba is doing the grand work to humanize him and his many capacities, the story invariably leaves him more of a passenger versus a character. So when [spoilers for rest of paragraph] his own story of romance gets piggy backed by Tilda Swinton and it turns into a wish for her own love story, specifically with him, I can’t help but feel deeply conflicted. So little about their interaction has been built for meaningful romance. I genuinely thought we were going to get hit for some biting irony, but so much of the sequence that comes after feels like a bevy of “and then…” punctuation marks that just keep putting me at a distance from whatever connection is supposed to really exist, especially one we are meant to feel wistful about. Especially given the fact that at its core this is a romance wished for, even cruelly forced. There is all but one line that recognizes this fact - and yet it soon gets tutted away before focusing on other things, leaving it, like so many things in this film, as a contradiction that is woefully unpacked.

All during the film I kept asking myself “where are you going with all this? What are you after here?” The film’s final arc feels like the chance to dive in, but outside of a few touches of metaphor and finding romance again after shutting yourself off - all before moving on and mixing in another metaphor. The ending sequence’s constant use of fades and title cards only seem to exacerbate the confusion, especially as things seem to feint back and forth to alternative purposes, as if all part of the film that is deeply contradicting itself. I’d feel so much happier if I felt that contradiction had more purpose, but I genuinely have no idea what it thinks of these subjects beyond their existence. And as a critic, it’s really hard when a film is trying to be a meditation in a way that you can’t really find a way to meditate on. And for you, I imagine there are few responses less interesting to read than a critic watching a given sequence and going “… uh, okay?” Especially when those same images or feelings may have moved you. To wit, I’ve seen some people scoff at the big emotional swings in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once and I’m just left to wonder “WHAT!?! HOW IS THIS NOT DESTROYING YOU!?!?!?” But in the end, mileage may vary.

So as I’ve sat here editing this essay, I’ve done the thing I rarely do, which is read around at some other far more positive reactions. I think most of these reactions are being kind or showcasing a love of the deeper subject matter. I think this is fair. But perhaps I’m at a loss because this should be my exact shit. I mean, George Miller made a film about a narrative-ologist that is trying to pick apart the meanings of stories in society. But where a film likeThe French Dispatch sent me running to my computer to vomit 22k words about the many observations within that spectacular piece of work, I feel no such urge with this. Which makes me sad. And also leaves the film a bit of a curio in Miller’s filmography, though not a wholly errant one. In some ways it feels like an odd combination of Lorenzo’s Oil  - what with its operatic treatment of an oblong process - and The Witches of Eastwick - perhaps just for its exploration of metaphysical sexuality. But in the latter film there were core conflicts that evoked a sense of playfulness, along with an air of provocation that feels sorely lacking here. Like, is it odd to say that I can’t help but wish Three Thousand Years of Longing was much, much weirder? I’d love to escape the inertia of it all. And normally I could just rest on the details of the text, but there’s so little in the details that I can string together into something meaningful for me. It stands as a collection of things, all meaningful in their own right, all trying to get at the sum total of human existence - but combines them in a way that almost feels evasive to me. The film never congeals in a way that makes it all seem a miracle of purpose. It never crests to that necessary moment of “yes, yes, this is why this is a movie.” Least of all in the most crucial element, with is the emotional core of the relationship between our two main characters. So it sort of leaves me with a question.

How does a movie like this get made?

It’s probably because Mad Max: Fury Road is really that good. Talk about a film being a miracle of purpose, it would be easy to bet on anything from the filmmaker behind it. But that Fury Road was also a miracle of process. One born out of grime, sweat, failure, collaboration and the necessary years to reinvent. And when happens by comparison, when you get a miracle assumed? What happens when the diligence of process slips away? This is not to say that this new film is not a labor of love, nor born from the same process. You feel the love and ambition throughout. I just can’t help but get stuck in the aching first draft-ness of it all. That has a million questions about what a given part is really after. And I admit that the process of watching it left me with a sadness that’s hard to describe, though perhaps the fault of a certain brand of hope. But I also feel content with this space of wondering. Talking about movies has to come from a place of love, after all. Maybe I’ll like it more with time. But upon first watch, if you had told me several years ago that I’d fail to connect with George Miller’s new movie and end up finding solace that night in watching 6 episodes of a volleyball anime I’d say “that feels like a strange turn of events.” But that’s what happens with events. They turn. And it is something that, to its credit, Three Thousand Years of Longing understands implicitly.

And perhaps, that is enough.

<3HULK