Since creating the dystopian classic “Brazil” in 1985, Terry Gilliam has directed just eight more features — a disappointing total for such a feverish imagination. And those films have frequently been half-cocked or messed up, as though damaged in transit.
His newest, “The Zero Theorem,” is signature Gilliam: visually exuberant and robustly cynical, it shows the director still circling the big ideas he’s been nursing since his Monty Python days.
Pat Rushin’s futuristic script is draped around the defeated shoulders of a worker drone named Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz). Convinced he is dying, he pesters his manager (David Thewlis) to be allowed to work — Qohen inputs “entities” into a fearsomely complicated database — at home.
Most of the movie takes place in two spectacular sets: the garish corporate workplace, and Qohen’s cavernous home, an abandoned, partly burned-out church. For reasons that remain murky, the increasingly jittery hero is visited by a teen tech genius (Lucas Hedges) and a saucy young woman (Melanie Thierry); also mixed into the chaos are Qohen’s daft psychotherapist (Tilda Swinton, still in “Snowpiercer” mode) and a genial white-haired company boss known only as Management (Gilliam’s “Brothers Grimm” star Matt Damon).
If the film has anything like a narrative rope to cling to, it’s that Qohen is trying to solve an elusive theorem that will prove the meaning of life, or maybe the absence of the meaning of life. Gilliam’s ability to manufacture worlds is bracing at first, and Waltz is an inspired choice for the lead. Waltz’s head is shaved — highlighting the fact that the man has a very sci-fi skull — and he adopts a crabbed walk that makes him look like a cut-out from one of Gilliam’s animations.
The ending takes us into favored Gilliam territory: the tantalizing seduction of embracing fantasy as an escape from misery. The fact that Gilliam already has his mind made up against that seduction is one of the things that dampen this movie’s life.
Its middle hour is a wheel-spinning jumble of outrageousness and noise, and mostly pretty tiresome. On the other hand, if you have a vast appetite for watching wheels spin, nobody does it quite as floridly as Terry Gilliam.
“The Zero Theorem” (2 stars)
Definitely a Terry Gilliam extravaganza: a futuristic dystopia where a worker drone (Christoph Waltz) searches for the meaning of life. Gilliam’s incredible designs and robust cynicism are very much on display; unfortunately, so is his tendency to spin his wheels.
Rating: R, for nudity
Showing: Grand Illusion theater
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