Three Thousand Years of Longing - 2022
Updated: Dec 16, 2022
Here is a film that is a sumptuous delight visually but which does not offer near the same rewards in many other regards. This is the trouble at the very heart of Three Thousand Years of Longing, namely that it’s critical moments as a two-hander with a pair of the finest thespians on the planet just works WORLDS better than any of the other tales this djinn is dishing. Again I say, there are some incredible sequences with powerful images and foreign lands rendered onscreen (visuals where, you know, we remember it is George Miller at the helm here). But the trouble is, I rarely cared one lick about who such and such court servant or which sultan filled with bloodlust came across the djinn’s path. No, I was much more interested in the tale unfolding between these two in bathrobes.
In a way this makes great sense too. It becomes emphatically clear during a few moments in the film that this was a “COVID production” through and through. Masked onlookers to lecture hall speeches are certainly one clue. But so is small sets with stripped down crew. This requires the production design and effects of these sagas in alien worlds to do a lot of heavy lifting, and the results are, well, mixed. Of course, it is also the case that we want to spend the most time with these two and their burgeoning love because of the caliber of the bodies in the room.
Whatever my critiques of the overall project, the casting of Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba is decidedly not one of them. Tilda is balancing this woman of erudition and a long life largely untold with hints of secret longing and a quiet wonder. She has to be both nerdy and evocative, world-wise and a little doe-eyed about this supernatural creature before her. As usual, she pulls it off (seemingly) effortlessly. Elba, by contrast, just needs to look jacked around some haphazard, not all that well-rendered CGI dust and speak calmly in that deep, velvety baritone. He does all this with ease, but adds on a pretty affecting performance of a soul trapped in a kind of purgatory caused by his own longing for the female form.
This is, I think, ultimately where Three Thousand Years wants to end up - as this hopeless romantic yarn which whisks us away on exotic adventures and leaves us in puddles championing the power of story. What is really unfortunate is that I’m SO internally drawn to the idea of the capability of narrative to raise us to our best selves. But alas, Miller’s picture just does not take us there.
Instead it comes home in a clunky puddle jumper that reeks of either late studio intervention or an effort to quickly wrap up the proceedings. All along, Alathea (Swinton) has been warning the audience that “wish tales” are always cautionary in nature. Here, it seems the message (thanks to some late arriving “neighbors") is about the danger of ostracizing the “other” and judging books by their covers. Sure, the central love story gets a bit of a tidy bow, but the editing and structuring of the film’s final ten minutes left much to be desired. Funnily enough, I appreciated where the wish plot landed in a few key ways. But there was something lost along the way from setup to payoff.
Stories really do have the power to change us. But we need to be able to find ourselves in their “pages.” With Three Thousand Years of Longing, George Miller granted us a picture that perhaps only he could make, filled with wondrous places, rather uninspired characters, and a central pair that we don’t mind cozying up to for 100 minutes. Stick with Idris and Tilda. The rest falls away like djinn’s dust.
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