REVIEW: The Zero Theorem (2014)

Robert Altman always felt that you could only get the measure of a film if you see it at least twice. Terry Gilliam’s cinema, intentionally or not, bares this out, since many of his recent films have required more than one viewing in order to entirely make sense of them. Tideland, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and now The Zero Theorem are all somewhat difficult works, the former two becoming easier after more than one viewing. Alas, for The Zero Theorem, I’ll have to make do.

Set in the near future – more a utopia than a dystopia, as Gilliam has called it, though presumably only for certain people – Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz) leaves his home, a disused church, and goes to work. He is an ‘entity-cruncher’, which is a job that seems to combine complex mathematical theory with pedalling. He wants to work from home as he is waiting on a phone call that may explain to him the meaning of his existence. He has been waiting on this phone call for years. Management (Matt Damon) decides to allow him to work from home but on the condition that he works on the Zero Theorem, a theorem that might just prove the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. He is overseen by his supervisor (David Thewlis) and helped by Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry) and Management’s son, Bob (Lucas Hedges).

If you didn’t know this was a Terry Gilliam film going in, you would be certain of it before the end. The script, written by Pat Rushin, is imbued with Gilliam references. Christoph Waltz looks like Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys; he is bewildered like Jonathan Pryce in Brazil, while the fantasy worlds are from The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, albeit this time the result of technology and not magic. As such, however, The Zero Theorem feels slightly dated. The virtual reality suits recall The Matrix and some moments, meant to represent the depressing future, are now a little too recognisable – particularly the party scenes in which everyone dances to their own iPod, which actually exist in the form of headphone discos. In a way, The Zero Theorem feels like a film behind the times, a film Gilliam made over ten years ago and didn’t release until now.

The film has big themes about the meaning of life and the possibility or impossibility of proving that all is for nothing and it is not without interest here. Gilliam has dealt with big themes before but he has never seriously engaged with these questions – certainly not in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. There are few interesting ideas about life being a horrible mistake and death being the ultimate entity, the idea that faith allows people to waste their lives waiting for death, that it is much better to come to terms with the finality of a meaningless existence so that the business of living can be engaged in properly – which is presumably what the slightly opaque ending represents. These ideas come to fruition late in the film, where the entire film is reassessed – and thus requiring a second viewing. The Zero Theorem may just be Gilliam’s most intentionally symbolic film, since the plot here of ‘entity-crunching’ is not important and the film is ultimately just about how we spend and cope with our lives. Leth moves from depression, to madness, to romantic fervour, to disappointment, to anger, to a strangely therapeutic acceptance – somewhat similar to the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief. This becomes more apparent as the film goes along, and this is ultimately what is problematic with the film.

Terry Gilliam has always worked best with a degree of chaos, and even his best films have their messy elements, often very successfully integrated into the film as a whole. This ramshackle nature, however, has become more and more apparent in his later work as ideas come thick and fast and never seem to hang together exactly right. Seeing a new Gilliam film for the first time can be a bewildering and disappointing experience and there is always the impression that something has been missed. In a sense, Gilliam does not structure his films well, they move at a great pace but only in the sense of a runaway train. Often the later films can be scattershot and hit-and-miss, as interesting and comprehensible as they are bland and confusing – an interesting idea followed by a fairly terrible gag about a cigarette accidentally placed in a hat. The Zero Theorem feels like Gilliam’s least focussed and most badly made film, an impression not particularly helped by his trademark sets and camera movements (the camera always looks like it is about to topple over) and some bad dialogue from Rushin. And yet, a second viewing, and a third and fourth, allowed Tideland and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to reveal their truer nature, and both came to make more sense, and so, to a degree, writing about The Zero Theorem after one viewing may just be a self-defeating exercise.

What is ultimately laudable about Gilliam’s work is his commitment to challenging the audience and to never make a comforting, easy film. Appreciating these later works requires patience, commitment, effort, concentration and, maybe most importantly, time. And often even messy Gilliam can be more interesting and enjoyable than conventional Hollywood cinema. The overall effect of The Zero Theorem is the feeling that something out of the ordinary has just been seen and that it might require some work, and possibly a liberal dose of one’s own creativity, to satisfactorily decode, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

See also:

The Master

The Long Goodbye

REVIEW: Django Unchained (2013)

Django Unchained is yet another two and a half hour Hollywood film with slavery as its backdrop from another white American director. While Lincoln was primarily about democracy and the sixteenth president, Django Unchained has even less to do with slavery and is more of a throwback to the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 1970s.

Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave, who is freed by Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a dentist/bounty hunter. They form an alliance since Django can point out some people that Schultz is looking for and, in return, Schultz can help Django get his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) back. Broomhilda was sold into slavery and is under the thumb of brutal plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

It is difficult to review a Tarantino film without addressing his career so far, something that Tarantino himself openly invites with all his talk of a legacy. The fact is that Tarantino hasn’t made a good film since 1997, with all of his films since ranging from unlikeable self-indulgences to potentially interesting films that are both badly written and just too long. The two Kill Bill films and Death Proof fall in the latter category and his apparent comeback Inglourious Basterds suffered from being over-written and over-long. Django Unchained falls into both oddly enough, being a film that is too childish to say anything interesting about its supposed subject, slavery, and is also much, much too long.

Tarantino has been making westerns since Kill Bill: Volume 2, so his first straight western feels tired. But, primarily, the problem is the length. Tarantino wishes to emulate a kind of exploitation cinema in which a running time over ninety minutes would have been too much and yet he makes a film tribute that is almost twice as long. Whether its ego or the inability to stop once the fan boy enthusiasm kicks in, there is a decent eighty-minute film somewhere in Django’s bulk just waiting for the judicial use of a pair of scissors. However, even this is debatable as Tarantino has made an extremely childish film, one that would be best aimed at twelve-year olds where it not for the repetitive and overused violence. Tarantino himself has claimed that the film addresses slavery, but it doesn’t. It uses slavery as the historical background for yet another revenge plot, but the film has nothing to say about the subject. Worse still, the slaves barely get a look in – if they aren’t silent, they are monosyllabic. And Django is not much of a hero, or indeed a character, his arc moving simply from victim to victimiser. Schultz, Candie and Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a not-so radical revision of the Uncle Tom stereotype, are all more interesting characters. In fact, all of the film’s best scenes are Christoph Waltz’, particularly a sequence late in the film involving a handshake in which Dr Schultz decides that he cannot ignore the evil he has seen any longer, an irritating suggestion of what the film might have been if Tarantino had curbed all his inane stylistics.

Django Unchained is full of violent sequences depicting the horrors of slavery such as hot boxes, unleashed dogs and whippings. Most grotesque is a sequence involving Mandingo fighting, in the film a death match between two large weapon-less slaves. However, it is unclear whether Tarantino is using these atrocities to make a point about America’s bloody past or if he is merely raising the stakes in his revenge narrative and delighting in violent spectacle as usual. Tarantino has never been one to make a point and his post-1997 films have rarely been adult or political, but his fascination with historical violence makes one slightly uneasy. It is strange that Inglourious Basterds rightfully avoided addressing the Holocaust and yet Django Unchained feels that it can say something about slavery. Indeed, it is telling that as soon as the horrible spectacle of Mandingo fighting is over, Tarantino opts straight away for a cringingly bad Franco Nero (Nero played Django in the 1966 original film) cameo, returning to what really interests him.

Django Unchained is full of longueurs, which can often be spotted a mile away. When Schultz mentions the legend “Die Nibelungen” or when DiCaprio pulls a skull out of a box, we know that a long explanatory monologue will follow. Tarantino remains a talented writer-director and there are many moments where Tarantino knows exactly what he is doing, but these moments are few and far between. One of the problems with the film is that certain things are over-egged (two climactic shoot-outs) while other, more complex moments are under-developed (there is a suggestion of a dark side to Django but nothing is made of it).

Django Unchained is yet another frustratingly bland film from Quentin Tarantino and another wasted opportunity to be as smart and complex of this filmmaker can be – Reservoir Dogs remains his most interesting, most challenging and shortest film. Though not entirely unrewarding since, as with Inglourious Basterds, there are a few moments of interest, though much less here, Django Unchained is too long, too flippant and too childish. Rated 18, it is way beyond the demographic that would appreciate it most. Yet, since it was a hit, expect Tarantino’s next film to be exactly the same, if not worse.