GeorgeMiller veers off Fury Road for the eccentric, romantic fable ThreeThousandYearsofLonging, starring IdrisElba and TildaSwinton.
To what magic lamp, monkey’s paw, or wishing well does George Miller owe his career of improbable dream projects? On and off for decades, this Aussie writer-director and demolition derby-ist has wrangled bountiful resources in pursuit of offbeat glory, splurging top studio dollar on dubiously “family-friendly” menageries and increasingly elaborate dystopias.
The aforementioned hotel is in Istanbul, where “narratologist” Alithea has flown for a convention of book fanatics devoted to the study of the ways humanity has always used stories to make sense of existence. This rational, reasonable academic is so used to playing the observer, to burying herself in the written exploits of others, that it takes her a while to accept that she’s stumbled into a fantastic yarn of her own.
Miller adapted this heady fantasy from “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” a novella by A. S. Byatt. The British author broke up the conversation between human and immortal with the occasional graph of backstory, the djinn regaling Alithea — named Gillian in the original text — with anecdotes from the centuries of his eventful past. For Miller, these asides are an opportunity to play anthologist and create his own nesting doll of fables in the key of One Thousand and One Nights.
The movie is at its most unusually enchanting, however, in that hotel room, with two great actors making a meal of an odd predicament and a discussion that slowly gains philosophical and romantic dimensions. Miller makes great use of Elba’s dashing leading-man qualities, his smolder and intensity; it’s the benevolent flip side of how he deployed Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick — a comparable conflation of movie-star charisma and the uncanniness of a supernatural being.
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