REVIEW: The Zero Theorem

Terry Gilliam’s stuff is weird. To compare his films to other films is like comparing Turducken to beer (mm, Turducken and beer..). He’s created a world and an ongoing story that can pretty much now only be compared to itself. The Zero Theorem is not unique in any way, not even by Gilliam’s insane standard, but it is beautiful, in a million different ways.

It would certainly require multiple viewings to pick up on all the details in the art and in his story. He, like so many favorite arthouse directors, sets up the majority of the story in hyperintentional visual and sound cues, and lets the actors be the blood that lubricates the machine. It’s a simple machine. His vision is almost childlike, in all the ways, and in this one, Gilliam has boiled his twisted version of a classic fairy tale down to its barest plot essence, so the story, while perhaps not as complex as some of his others, is still powerful. But like the fictional Zero Theorem itself, there are shades of meaning, reflected virtually endlessly. It may be a wank, like all the other critics say, but it’s a glorious one.

The sensory aspects of this film were exciting, thought-provoking, even painful in some evocative ways. Glimpses of thing like The Church of Batman the Redeemer and all the overt symbolism playing on the directors’ latest concerns and fascinations, and evoke the thinking and feeling nerd in all of us. I like it when there are clues that you don’t quite get because so much is going on (or so little) and then BAM! You notice the rats.

Richly layered and textured, seguing from screamingly bright to depressingly dim, dirty and awkward and shiny – all the cues we’ve come to recognize from the shared view from inside his strange head paint the whole picture. The shift from the bright loud outside world to Q(no u)ohen’s silent, featureless and tightly controlled inner world is both disturbing as well as disturbingly familiar.

The sound was a big part of the story, like a character itself, a literal counterpoint to the design character. The layering between spaces – inside/outside, virtual world/”real” world”, married to every physical detail, both real as well as the CGI choices Gilliam made, had both a stunning and numbing impact, which, when juxtaposed with Qohen’s over-saturated, almost plastic, placid tropical fantasy life, was as disorienting as only he could mean it to be.

Qohen Leth, played by Christoph Waltz, is also almost silent, almost featureless and tightly controlled, to the point of seeming nearly inhuman, despite his tortured simultaneous aversion to pretty much everything and attraction to love and life. This story is about his learning to become human – or finally let go of the need.

The acting was exactly what you’d expect from a cast like this in a film this, with a director like Gilliam – odd, endearing, broken, symbolic, confusing, tender, falsely encouraging, deeply heartbreaking, ugly and beautiful at the same time. It’s impossible to phone in a Gilliam role. He pushes his actors in ways that other directors are afraid to, and that makes them able to be part of his strange world, turns them into true Players. Even though they may look and feel like part of the set at times, they are able to give serious and emotional depth to these crazed characters. Gilliam had Waltz shave his eyebrows for the role because he wanted to take away one of his most expressive tools, in order to make Qohen appear even more closed off and ‘Other’, which is no small task in his films. He literally weaves Matt Damon into the fabric of Qohen’s reality, and Mélanie Thierry could not be a more perfect representation of Temptation and Desire with a healthy balance of Despair, for the complete Muse. David Thewlis plays Gilliam’s classic peevish and yet sympathetic Every Man brilliantly. And together, like some kind of Coal-Punk Greek Chorus in another of Gilliam’s lush tragecomedies, they paint the bright and bleak picture for us, a sweet and sad tale of a terminally lonely, sickly obsessed man working at his endless job of trying to figure out the meaning of existence for others, while hiding alone in the dark and routine, waiting on tenterhooks for THE phone call to come that will change his life and finally give him his purpose.

It has a simple often confusing plot, weird ,random characters steeped in heavily symbolic meaning, and no real certain or happy ending. Yes it sounds familiar, and it’s supposed to, and I think it’s supposed to bother us a bit. Goal achieved.