About 12 years ago, during what now looks like the show’s last Golden Age, Saturday Night Live aired a particularly amusing short film in which Andy Samberg played a yuppie go-getter who, after carelessly damaging the talisman of a vindictive homeless man (Fred Armisen), becomes the victim of a curse. The nature of the particular hex placed on Samberg? From time to time, a gust of wind heralds the emergence of Sergio, a long-haired, shirtless, oily-chested saxophonist played by Mad Men’s Jon Hamm.
Imagine, if you can, a feature-length version of that same SNL short film that, instead of sending up a certain superficial version of Eastern mysticism, takes it oh, so seriously, and rather than making the yuppie’s superciliousness funny, presents its protagonist’s “spiritual journey” with the utmost earnestness. Alas, that’s a pretty fair description of director George Miller’s new fantasy-drama Three Thousand Years of Longing, a tedious, self-important film that never gives any indication of being in on any joke of any kind.
Based on A.S. Byatt’s short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” the film stars Tilda Swinton as a British intellectual called Alithea Binnie, whose field, narratology, relates to the significance of storytelling across millenniums, from Greek mythology to DC Comics superheroes. The character’s twee name, pageboy hairdo, eyeglass chains, and affected manner suggest that the auteur of Mad Max has, perhaps, been watching too many Wes Anderson movies, including those featuring the increasingly arch, artificial Swinton, such as Moonrise Kingdom and The French Dispatch.
The film opens in Istanbul, to which Alithea has journeyed to participate in some sort of literary conference but whose function in — ahem — narrative terms is simply to place our monkish, reserved, uptight, and unattached heroine in an appropriately exotic, consciousness-expanding setting. While browsing inside one of Istanbul’s innumerable antique trinket shops, Alithea is drawn to an entirely inconspicuous glass bottle. In a burst of obsessive-compulsive behavior — this is one movie made during the coronavirus pandemic that appears to endorse the ethic of “staying safe” wholeheartedly, evidenced by the numerous characters who wear face masks in public places — Alithea tries to polish up the bottle with her electric toothbrush in the hotel bathroom sink. Naturally, the bottle cracks, and out of the shards emerges, in an ashy haze, the Djinn (Idris Elba), a figure out of Arabian mythology whose copious wish-granting abilities, and residence inside a bottle, approximate those of a genie.
In such films as The Witches of Eastwick (1987) and his classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Miller has proven himself to be unusually adept at blending the realistic with the fantastic, and he is at his best in the early scenes in which Alithea reckons with her new reality: All of a sudden, a gargantuan-proportioned creature fills every inch of her hotel room, wishes to carry on conversations using “the Greek of Homer,” and, after watching a few moments of a television documentary about Albert Einstein, plucks him out of the screen to talk to Alithea. (Soon, the Djinn slims down to human scale and proceeds to communicate using ordinary English.)
To induce the cagey, skeptical, self-sufficient Alithea to take advantage of the three wishes to which she is entitled, the Djinn gives an account of the multimillennium odyssey that he endured before being liberated from his bottle in the hotel bathroom. There follows a series of flashbacks in which the Djinn, among other things, is shown to be one-third of a love triangle involving Solomon and Sheba and, later, becomes involved in palace intrigue during the Ottoman Empire.
In these elaborately visualized but wearing stretches, Three Thousand Years of Longing suggests one of Terry Gilliam’s tedious crazy-quilt fantasias — say, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. And because they are structured as self-contained episodes, like stories in a storybook, they lack a certain dramatic punch. One has the impression of great resources having been expended to recreate, for example, a sultan’s private quarters filled with enormously overweight concubines. But the effect is merely pictorial: The scenes are achievements of production and costume design, not to mention CGI effects, but they don’t add up to very much.
Once the film returns to the present day for good, the real question is whether Alithea will avail herself of the wishes on offer to her. Sensitive to the costs of having dreams fulfilled, Alithea merely asks for the love of the Djinn, to whom she has formed an attachment as the two sit in her hotel room, each adorned in bathrobes, as he beguiles her with his exploits. Yet this ersatz love story turns out to be inexcusably maudlin: Naturally, the Djinn helps transform Alithea into a warmer, more open person. And the Djinn, carted by Alithea back home to England, finds he is made unwell by the commotion and hubbub of the West. In an amusing scene, he survives the X-ray scanner at the airport. Like E.T., he becomes sick by being around too many people and too much modern technology.
Perhaps because of the inherent cartoonishness of the central relationship — a cardboard cutout bookworm falls for an actual genie — the stakes seem so, so low. It’s quite a contrast to what is still Miller’s most powerful and persuasive film, Lorenzo’s Oil: In that 1992 masterpiece, the director deployed all of his tricks, imaginative cinematography, expressive acting, and a fablelike tone, to tell the true-life story of Augusto Odone, who sought a novel treatment for the adrenoleukodystrophy that beset his little boy. By contrast, Three Thousand Years of Longing is just a lot of hooey. What are we meant to take from this film? That allegories, folk stories, and myths still have the capacity to seduce even we cynical, atheistic members of the modern world? That the West has gone rancid and the East remains noble? In the end, this film has scarcely more substance than that SNL skit about the talisman and Jon Hamm playing the sax — with a whole lot fewer intentional laughs.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
