Idris Elba goes from fighting CGI lions to being a genie. What range!
Literary scholar Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) discovers a small bottle in a bazar in Istanbul while at a conference there on the connectivity of stories in culture. Opening the bottle in her hotel room, a djinn emerges (Idris Elba) and grants her three wishes, after which he will finally be free. However, Alithea is more than acutely aware that any tale of a genie and wishes comes with a caution...
George Miller's filmography, like the cars in 'Mad Max: Fury Road', often takes big swerves and sharp turns. Sometimes, it ends up in the ditch and sometimes, it ends up soaring through the air. 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' looks shiny, is driven by competent and skilled performers, but it somehow manages to spend much of its time spinning the wheels than going anywhere.
Much of the movie is made up of Idris Elba's genie character telling the tale of how he came to be in the bottle, which takes in stories from the Levant and the Ottoman Empire and characters such as the Queen of Sheba and Suleiman the Magnificent, and remind us that wishes often bring curses with them. Yet, Alithea - Tilda Swinton's character - is a narratologist, a scholar of stories, and understands this all too well, and tries to rid herself of the responsibility because she finds herself far too content to wish for anything in particular. Her life is stable and her imagination, vivid though it may be, is held in check.
Yet, 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' is, as the name suggests, a romance. We are drawn into the sensual world of fantasy and meaning, of the allure of story, so that when Alithea's character does eventually wish for something, it's because the genie has wooed her in such a way that the wish means less when the fantasy becomes real. Yet, by the end, 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' seems to then caution the viewer by reminding us that fantasy cannot exist in our world of constant chaos and sensory overload, where science has overtaken religion and magic, and logic dictates all stories must have a beginning, middle, and resolution.
Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba both have enough charm and presence to power this thing, but Elba has more work to do than Swinton. His genie character floats through history, guiding the mythical characters into the story, weaving it through his vivid narration, and then later, becoming real and existing in our world. Swinton's character is the audience, hard-wired to sniff out bullshit, question anything as too good to be true, but eventually, gets swept up into it all. 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' is in love with the very idea of story and storytelling, that it gives meaning to our lives and helps understand our world around us.
On that, George Miller has succeeded. You really do get a sense of how important it is, how it feeds into all cultures across the globe, how it gives purpose and context to our lives, and how our lives lack colour and zest without them. It's just a shame that 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' spins up a great yarn, but then loses itself in the conclusion. Of course, when it's all so fantastical like this, it can't not be an anti-climactic ending.
After all, it's a story and not reality.