Friendo to HE: “3000 Years of Longing is a weird, strange, $60M art film with bits of Terry Gilliam tossed in. Too slow for the Joe and Jane Popcorn crowd. Some great art direction, costumes and visual FX but not for the mainstream. George Miller’s most self-indulgent film to date.”
From Manohla Dargis N.Y. Times review:
Files from Cannes on 5.20.22: You can’t say George Miller‘s Three Thousand Years of Longing isn’t trippy or eye-popping or CG-swamped or…okay, a bit florid.
But it also touches bottom with a poignant, imaginative and very adult current of romance, discovery and even transcendence.
Much of Miller’s film is invested in a 21st Century CG-meets-Michael Powell and The Thief of Baghdad aesthetic, but it’s framed by a highly unusual and touching love story between Tilda Swinton‘s English writer — whipsmart, spinsterish — and Idris Elba‘s hulking and thoughtful Djinn (i.e., magic genie).
I can’t say that Longing is a supreme G-spot experience — too much is submerged in the Djinn’s fantastical history, which is devoid of story tension — but the film has something of real emotional value while Swinton and Elba are holding the screen.
I was praying that the film wouldn’t stay inside the genie bottle and smother us with CG fantasy mush. But during the last 15% or 20% it leaves the CG palaver behind and focuses on the grown-up love story, which is one of the gentlest, most other-worldly and spiritually driven I’ve ever experienced.
Elba and Swinton are wonderful — seasoned, grounded, playing-for-keeps actors at the peak of their game. I was scared at first, but Longing turned out much better than I expected. A mixed bag with an intriguing beginning and a payoff that feels (or felt in my case) sublime.
Elba’s gentle and reflective genie reminded me, of course, of Rex Ingram‘s Djinn in The Thief of Baghdad (’40). What a contrast between this exuberant, rip-roaring, loin-clothed giant and Ingram’s quiet, tradition-minded “Tilney” — servant to Ronald Colman‘s Supreme Court nominee in George Stevens‘ The Talk of the Town (’42).
Friendo to HE: “I swear to God during one scene involving morbidly obese naked women I said to myself, ‘Oh boy, Jeff is gonna hate this scene. The Shirley Stoler seduction scene in Seven Beauties times ten.”
HE to Friendo: “I ignored the obesity out of politeness.”