Movie Reaction: Three Thousand Years of Longing

Formula: Good Luck to You, Leo Grande * Aladdin

 

Nothing was going to be Mad Max: Fury Road. That movie is a miracle. It came after 20 years of George Miller making family films which was preceded by 10 years of him making adult-skewing Hollywood films. There is no equivalent to that kind of thunderous pivot and return to form. However, if you throw that movie out of the timeline, Three Thousand Years of Longing is the exact movie I’d expect from George Miller. It’s an adult fairy tale with striking visuals, a pair of strong lead performances, and a sometimes peculiar, drifting story. That’s his non-Mad Max career in nutshell.

 

At first, this film sure sounds like a COVID production. It’s the story of a professor of folklore (Tilda Swinton) who unleashes a Djinn (Idris Elba) in her hotel room from a bottle she bought on a trip to Istanbul. The Djinn proceeds to tell her the story of how he came to be trapped in that bottle. That sounds like it’s going to be two characters talking in a hotel room: very COVID. And it’s true, the film was set to start filming in March 2020 originally before getting COVID delayed. It is a massively more expansive movie that your average COVID production though. The film brings to life centuries of the Djinn’s tales with incredible creativity. I was captivated throughout much of this portion of the movie, which was the majority of it. It’s led me to believe that George Miller would be an excellent person to have telling stories around a campfire.

 

When the Djinn isn’t telling his story though, the movie struggles. Swinton has three wishes to use. There’s a back and forth with the Djinn where she believes he’s a trickster or that this is a Monkey’s Paw situation. That discussion just isn’t very interesting. There are few things harder for me to watch than a weird movie that’s asking Tilda Swinton to be the normal one. She can do normal. She won her Oscar for normal. But it a movie like Three Thousand Years of Longing, it’s like driving a Ferrari and keeping it in first gear. My biggest issue with the movie is that when the Djinn finishes telling his tale, the movie screeches to a halt and still has 20-ish minutes left. That’s when it turns into a magical romance between the professor and the Djinn. Early in the film, Swinton gives a presentation about how the more that science explains things, the less room in the world there is for folklore. The film then literalizes it by having technology literally chip away at the Djinn. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s tonally from another movie and lacks the expanse and lush production of the tales of the Djinn’s past. Had the movie ended soon after the Djinn finishes telling his story, I would’ve left the theater in a haze, eager to get wrapped up in the story again. As is, the film gave me 20 minutes to come back down to earth and turn The Fall into The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s a nice enough end, but it let way too much of the power of the film dissipate.

 

While I think I’ll come to appreciate the final act of the film more in time, it will always be a let down from the early parts of the film. Swinton and Elba are very good in the film. Elba is very good at downplaying the role. He knows he’s a Djinn. To him, there’s nothing special about it.

Yet that doesn’t step on the story itself. The writing for the film doesn’t often match the visuals. This definitely feels like a passion project, and I think Miller has earned another one of those.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend