- Dir: Mike Cahill. Cast: Owen Wilson, Salma Hayek, Nesta Cooper, Jorge Lendeborg, Jr, Ronny Chieng, Joshua Leonard, Steve Zissis, Bill Nye, Slavoj Žižek. No cert, 104 mins
Bliss, the latest thoughtful concoction from indie sci-fi auteur Mike Cahill (Another Earth, I Origins), has its mind on the matrix. Not The Matrix, per se – although the opening stretch throws up a lot of similarities, planting Owen Wilson’s fatigued tech-support employee in an unstable reality that may or may not be simulated. In time, there will be pills to pop and parallel universes to behold: there’s even the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek holding court in holographic form about notions of Heaven and Hell.
It starts with a simple idea – Wilson’s Greg Wittle drawing pictures of his dream home in a grey, barren corner office, while refusing to engage with his current surroundings or do his job. The company is patently fictitious – it’s called Technical Difficulties, and consists of drone workers doing little but apologise stridently down the phone. Greg’s boss (Steve Zissis) demands a point-blank meeting to deliver the news that he’s been fired, but Greg drags his heels in strange, stress-inducing ways – first phoning up to renew a prescription for an empty bottle of pills, then crushing up the last one and snorting it.
Medicating his dissatisfaction, lost in his sketches, Greg is divorced and vacant, barely there. Ironically enough, it’s everything else that’s not real, at least according to Dr. Isabel Clemens (Salma Hayek), his companion on a zig-zag journey of awakening, whom he meets for the first time at the sketchy bar (“Plato’s Dive”) across the street. Wild-eyed and clumpy-braided, she comes on like some kind of inner-city shaman, and is living in a self-made magic grotto under an LA River bridge. But she also has access to the yellow crystals that can save Greg’s life, at least for as long as the effects last.
If the above is enough to make your eyes glaze over, you’ll probably want to give Bliss a miss and find your own path to fulfilment. But there’s an engaging earnestness to it which sits side-by-side with a larky spirit of trial and error, almost like a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy where wild elements of chance keep dropping into the mix. There are wacky glitches, such as a triplicate extra appearing in the distance, and sudden ruptures in linear logic. The whole concept might be a big tease, but it’s one designed to contemplate relativity and happiness without name-dropping Einstein’s theories of either.
Midway, the cord is yanked – or, technically speaking, Greg and Isabel source some blue crystals off a drug dealer and take eight apiece. We wind up in what she reassures him is the real world, and wouldn’t you know, it perfectly matches his illustrations. Beneath the serene skies is a utopian vision of future life with mass automation, asteroid mining and civilised cocktail chatter for all. Poverty’s gone. It’s Plato’s ideal, if Plato had a lovely villa in Split, Croatia with poolside views of the harbour and Hayek as a radiant soulmate.
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