It’s important to remember that George Miller is – and has always been – more than Mad Max, but that Mad Max is all George Miller. See, Miller, like the bespectacled and bookish protagonist of his latest film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, is a storyteller, and my favorite interpretation (call it a fan theory or whatever you want, it’s still compelling) of the Mad Max films is that they’re ultimately depicting the creation of a folk legend. In the first, the “modern” world exists in living memory and is contextualized as such, but as the films progress, they get more and more fabulous until you wind up with a cult-leading warlord hoarding water and enslaving women, the thread linking reality and pure myth severed so long ago that it’s riding with the War Boys in Vahalla, shiny and chrome. Miller specializes in that kind of adult fairy tale even outside the Wasteland, most obviously in The Witches of Eastwick and more subtly in Lorenzo’s Oil, but even his children’s films’ tenors are perfectly pitched to shatter the hearts of even the coldest adult without overwhelming them with treacle. The Babe movies rightfully hold a special place in the hearts of parents everywhere as much as they do within the children they delight(this is also where I beg you to reconsider Happy Feet, which is as gorgeously imagined and rich as any of his other works as hard as it may be to swallow the idea of a jukebox musical about dancing penguins). So, to the folks hopped up on Fury Road who may leave Longing wondering exactly where the hell that filmmaker is and how a studio could finance a condensed adaptation of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, clothed, this time, in the rich fabrics that adorned The Thief of Baghdad which also somehow manages to be a painfully gorgeous and earnest two-person love story, well, this is who he’s always been.
Clocking in just under 110 minutes, Longing covers a span of human history that could be, in the hands of another filmmaker, perilous and paralyzing in its ambition. But Miller’s ferocious skill and ability as a storyteller ensure that it never strays too far from its emotional core, even as it documents the happenings within the court of Queen Sheba while she’s being romanced by King Solomon or the longings of a young woman, trapped in a loveless marriage to an older man and in an era in which her natural talents for science make her into a sort of Da Vinci’s Sister (with the inventor and artist substituting for Shakespeare in my adaptation of Woolf’s idiom). Such are all the things that a Djinn (Idris Elba) can witness throughout his odd immortality, linked to the mercurial wants and needs of the humans he’s bound to serve. Unlike the rest of his kind, this Djinn isn’t a trickster: he’s a hopeless romantic, doing his best to try and bring gratification and satisfaction to those around him and, occasionally, trying to forestall the worst possible outcomes for all, say, in a medieval Byzantine power struggle. But Altheia (Tilda Swinton), the storytelling scholar I mentioned earlier, has her doubts: she knows, from years and years of research, not to trust them.
But, then again, she’s found herself in an impossible circumstance: while in Istanbul for a conference, she stumbles upon a Nightingale’s Eye in a junk shop buried amongst a thousand other trinkets. It’s a gorgeous blue-and-white shaped bottle, covered in some amount of detritus, and when she returns to her hotel room and absent-mindedly starts to clean it with her electric toothbrush, she pops the top off and is overwhelmed by a swarm of electromagnetic vapor, which congeals into a giant. The Djinn introduces himself and, after a short interlude where he converses with her in Ancient Greek, sucks knowledge out of a computer and television to quickly learn English, clothes himself in a comfortable bathrobe just like hers, and presents her with a tray of delightful delicacies for her to nibble on, presents her with the eternal problem for both Djinn and “master.” She has three wishes. There are rules: she can’t wish to become a Djinn, nor can she wish for unlimited wishes, she can’t change the past or, say, eliminate suffering wholesale from the human condition, and her wishes, importantly, have to be her heart’s true desire. But, much like Christian Slater with Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire, why rush headlong into anything when you have the chance to pick the brain of a creature whose life contains stories beyond your imagination? And, much like anyone who ever imagined themselves in Slater’s role in that film, how could you not fall hopelessly and madly in love with a person trapped in such a desperate and romantic situation who also happens to look like that? So, over the course of his stories (three historical tales, with a modern-day fourth, much like Griffith’s bladder-busting apologia for The Birth of a Nation), we witness Altheia turn the central question over and over in her head and find ourselves, along with her, stunned as to where it ends up.
One can practically feel Miller taking each and every one of the Oscars that Fury Road surprisingly won back in 2016 and putting them in the smelter to fashion this particular brick of solid gold, and I’d argue that it was well worth it. Longing is what folks would call a “loss-leader,” and its financial prospects are suitably dismal given how hard it goes against the grain. As usual, Miller disregards many of the central tenets of the modern cinematic landscape and, instead, tells the story that he wishes to tell in the fashion that he wishes to tell it, without an ounce of irony or audience flattery included in the mix. He’s always proudly worn his silent-film influences on his sleeve, to the point that Fury Road got a black-and-white cut whose Blu-Ray one could always mute if they wanted to experience it without all that lovely sound design or, you know, intertitles. Yet the long stretches within the three tales without any diegetic dialogue – with Elba’s narration, the score, and the sounds within the scene comprising the audio track – make it clear that Miller’s placing the same kind of care and emphasis on visual storytelling as he did his last film. It’s a fantastically colorful and gorgeous bizarre bazaar of uncommon imagery, rendered fantastically with the same and oft-subtle usage of CGI that shocked so many after they discovered how much of Fury Road‘s central images were created in post-production, but applied to different ends. The pace remains frenetic throughout the historical tales, the images coming at such a fast clip that one may feel the need not to blink lest they miss something, but the film does slow down for its fourth story, a modern-day tale whose movement can feel ponderous and without an obvious direction. It bears few of the hallmarks of what Miller is properly known for, and perhaps best can be compared to the black-and-white sequence in the zoo at the climax of Happy Feet in its ability to depress, with all of the joy and vivid emotion of the first hour-and-fifteen minutes made all the more meaningful by its lack.
But that’s where Miller’s other talents come in. Elba and Swinton are a perfect pairing, and their energies are delightfully complementary in a way that elevates Miller’s already hyper-competent screenplay, which he co-wrote with Augusta Gore (it’s also lovely to see Swinton in a straight-man role, confronted by the oddities of the universe, much like she was in Memoria). There’s such a deep wellspring of emotion that the pairs – the cast and the writers – are able to tap into, and we’re all lucky enough to be able to drink from it, being the kind of rich refreshment that seems to elude so many similar works. Why they fail and why Miller succeeds seems to boil down to a single reason: they don’t mean what they say, and he always does. His tempered earnestness – be it focused on love, the power of storytelling, or in the propulsive and pounding nature of cinema itself, wielded as a blunt instrument to remind viewers that they have working and functional hearts that can still set off Apple Watch heart-rate alerts in the middle of movies – is in desperately short supply, and even if it were abundant, you’d find few other filmmakers able to execute it with the same level of joyous precision and wonder present in a film like Three Thousand Years of Longing. If Miller should choose (and if it’s not a sacrifice on his part or a concession) to make a dozen more Mad Max movies in his short time left on this planet so that he may find funding for ecstatically dreamy projects like this – and it’s an underrated power move to go ahead and sign on to a film like Furiosa knowing that you’ve got this chambered, waiting to splatter audiences’ expectations all across the walls – and then all moviegoers should thank their lucky fucking stars. We genuinely do not deserve his talents, and it’s amazing that we ever got the chance to witness them. After all, he could have just remained in medicine.