Arts & Events

New: The Zero Theorem: It Just Doesn't Add Up Opens September 19 at the Elmwood in Berkeley

Gar Smith
Sunday September 21, 2014 - 10:02:00 AM

The Zero Theorem, Terry Gilliam's latest film fantasy, nibbles off more than it can crunch. It is a grandiose presentation of a story that remains opaque and inscrutable. At the same time, it's a full-bore visual treat, filled with color, energy, invention and ambition. Still, the result is something like a applying a cruise liner paint job to a wooden raft. 

 

The Zero Theorem, Terry Gilliam's latest film fantasy, nibbles off more than it can crunch. On one hand, it's a grandiose presentation of a story that remains opaque and inscrutable. At the same time, it's a full-bore visual treat, filled with color, energy, invention and ambition. Still, the result is something like a applying a cruise liner paintjob to a wooden raft. 

The Zero Theorem begins and ends with a screenful of swirling chaos representing the Black Hole of Universal Death. In the first scene, a huge screen is filled with a terrifying image of the Black Hole, a galaxy-gulping Force that is slowly sucking in everything living and dead. Sitting in front of the screen is Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), a closeted mathematician obsessed with finding a theorem that can capture – and possibly refute – the existential power of the Implacable. 

As we meet Leth, he is sitting before his console in the all-together. Stark naked. (It's only by way of crafty filming and editing that we are not exposed to Waltz' Full Monty Python.) It's a powerful image, but it proves to be an empty one. Leth never again sits down to work au natural. There is much (way too much) of this film that remains unexamined and unexplained. 

Like Godot, Leth is waiting for a phone call that will end his search and redeem his existence. (By telling him that someone else has found the Answer to his Zero Quest?) It's not clear who would be making the call. Nor is there a clue as to the calls that do come in but only enrage Leth. (Wrong numbers? Political fund-raising pitches? Cold-call life insurance offers?) 

Perhaps it's best to forgo any attempt to reason with this film. Just accept it for the superficial fantasy it is. But you have to hand it to Gilliam, The Zero Theorem has a great surface. The filming was done in a huge studio in Romania, which may have served to amplify the other-worldly feel. 

In some ways, The Zero Theorem resembles Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 art film, Stalker -- another dystopian film about a strange and warped individual's endless and ultimately useless search for Answers. Like The Stalker, Qohen Leth is a damaged loner who warily skulks through life. And, like Stalker, Leth is a skinhead played by a formidable actor with a fierce profile, haunted eyes and the emotional and physical intensity of a mad-man suicide bomber -- always on the tipping point of an explosion. 

Waltz spends almost every moment of the film on screen and he's always mesmerizing – whether he's trying to build a perfectly stable Universe by waving a PlayStation-like console in front of his computer screen or pedaling furiously and fingering a handset in front of an arcade-game-set-up that rewards him with vials of colored liquids. Which he frantically shifts around and never consumes. (Don't ask.) But when Leth talks, he never speaks as an individual but as a collective. Instead, he complains: "We is stressed." "We is dying." (Why the resort to personal-plural grammar? No explanation. You might just conclude: "The Leth said, the better.") 

The film is chock-full of visually imaginative touches but some seem added just for the sake of sheer grotesquerie. Case in point: the "Two Clones," a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of enforcers dressed like zoot-suited Mafia Pimps. They never serve any plot purpose when they show up but they leave behind a disconcerting mental image that's hard to erase. 

Halfway through the journey, Leth is (inexplicably) adopted by Bainsley, a stunning young blond seductress who gets him rigged out in an electrified body suit so the two of them can jack themselves off (via separate computers) to frolic on a beautiful deserted beach in the Land of Virtual Reality. Where they talk, smooch and toss beach balls. (Again. Don't ask.) 

The cast is picture-perfect (even if the picture isn't). Waltz does amazing things with his body and his face (especially in a scene where he nearly dies of asphyxiation and his expressions encroach on the territory of CGI renderings). French actress Melanie Thierry is charmingly flirty as Bainsley, an ingénue/partygirl/pornsite-hostess who inexplicably (that problem again) falls for Waltz' don't-wanna-be-touched shut-away. (The role, while well played, is an embarrassment. Thierry's character is the personification of every teen boy's masturbatory fantasy. She is nothing but a mindless, comforting pleasure tool. Zero is the antithesis of a good "date film.") Matt Damon appears in three scenes as Management, the CEO of Mancom, a corporate wizard-of-odds who has (inexplicably again) hired Leth to spend his life trying to solve the Zero Theorem. (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…. No, wait, Management's standing in front of the curtain. It's just that his suit blends into the curtain – or the chair or the wall or, whatever.) 

David Thewlis (Jobey) looks and sounds like he's channeling a Monty Python sketch. Tilda Swinton (Dr. Shrink-Rom) dons a haystack wig and an overbite to impersonate a corporate shrink assigned to keep Leth in check. Lucas Hedges powers through his role as the 15-year-old son of Management. Hedges, despite his youth, crackles on the screen and swaggers through the role with quick imagination and easy confidence. Like they say: "Keep an eye out for this young man." 

There may be no screenwriting awards coming Gilliam's way but if there were an Oscar for Best Wigs, Best Sets, Best Light-emitting Jumpsuits, Best Computer-assisted Backgrounds, Gilliam's bizarre, unfathomable film could take home a shopping cart of well-deserved honors.