Bliss

From the French nick­nam­ing absinthe ​“la fée verte” in the 19^th cen­tu­ry to Lou Reed declar­ing hero­in his wife in song with the Vel­vet Under­ground, men have long con­flat­ed the plea­sures of intox­i­ca­tion with the temp­ta­tions of wom­ankind. These flighty mis­tress­es make you feel good, right up until they take over your life, at which point they then leave you more bro­ken than you’ve ever been before. Ingest, crash, repeat.

The inher­ent objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of liken­ing a per­son to a con­trolled sub­stance has made the device increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to pass muster with today’s fine-tuned misog­y­ny radars. And the more involved the metaphor, the more thin­ly a writer must spread it. It’s not a win­ning strat­e­gy for some­thing as lengthy and involved as a fea­ture film, a les­son that Mike Cahill’s lat­est sci-fi para­ble Bliss illus­trates to dis­as­trous effect.

It’s on an excep­tion­al­ly bad day in the life of Greg (Owen Wil­son), a drone at a tech sup­port office in which every­one speaks in apolo­gies, that his path cross­es Isabel’s (Salma Hayek). Pop­ping pills, divorced from his wife and estranged from their kids, he’s called in for a meet­ing that starts with his dis­missal and ends with him inad­ver­tent­ly mur­der­ing his boss. He hides the body and heads for a cool-down drink at the dingy water­ing hole across the street, where the shab­by yet intrigu­ing Isabel eats a few glow­ing yel­low crys­tals and tele­path­i­cal­ly dis­ap­pears the corpse Greg left behind.

As she explains, they are two of a scant num­ber of real peo­ple liv­ing in a sim­u­lat­ed real­i­ty she has learned how to con­trol with the crys­tals’ aid. (That this film’s release would con­cur with that of the sim­i­lar yet supe­ri­or A Glitch in the Matrix arous­es sus­pi­cions.) She and her world-warp­ing gems – lat­er, we’ll learn that eat­ing exact­ly 10 blue ones can trans­port their user to an idyl­lic alter­nate dimen­sion – suck Greg into an addic­tive down­ward spi­ral that spits them out in one of the many home­less encamp­ments dot­ting LA’s for­lorner streets.

Greg and Isabel shed their lam­en­ta­ble cir­cum­stances for much of the sec­ond act by get­ting so zonked on bluies that they slip into that far prefer­able par­al­lel uni­verse. There, they are wealthy spous­es with a pala­tial Cal­i­forn­ian estate, hob­nob­bing with thought lead­ers while ignor­ing the aggriev­ed under­class rag­ing in revolt just out­side their soirée.

Cahill’s clum­sy attempt at class com­men­tary even­tu­al­ly thuds back to earth, or at least, the ver­sion of it that we’ve been pre­sent­ed with. The many log­i­cal holes and oth­er dis­so­nance get explained away in the final min­utes, as the hal­lu­ci­nat­ed Isabel van­ish­es and Greg emerges from a drug-induced stu­por into a rehab meet­ing. There’s an argu­ment to be made that it’s unsport­ing to divulge the true nature of a movie’s twist end­ing in its review, but when inter­pre­ta­tion of the entire text hinges on that rev­e­la­tion, it’s impos­si­ble not to.

Either way, there’s not much to wor­ry about miss­ing out on here. Even before the big gotcha wipes away any­thing the pre­ced­ing hun­dred min­utes might have meant, Greg and Isabel’s mile-high dash into degen­er­a­cy lacks any authen­tic grit, unfit to share a nee­dle with the likes of Heav­en Knows What. The stranger flights of fan­cy don’t even take us any­where that far out, every bit as bland as the sub­plot fol­low­ing Greg’s daugh­ter and son on their mis­sion to reach him.

If Cahill is going to aban­don his philo­soph­i­cal aspi­ra­tions to make the whole thing about nar­cotics in no uncer­tain terms, he could have done more to cre­ate an atmos­phere to match the rolling high. Instead, the right­ly reject­ed Twi­light Zone pitch gets a lev­el of tech­ni­cal pol­ish to match. We can’t feel for Greg unless we feel what Greg feels. We have to want it as bad­ly as a lover.