In the press notes for his new movie Bliss, I Origins director Mike Cahill states that it’s “your typical sci-fi story, but it’s also a love story, but it’s also a father-daughter story at the same time.” That is probably as good and as efficient a summary as you are going to find for this sometimes engaging but wholly frustrating and incomplete Amazon Prime release. Starring the always-appealing Owen Wilson (who unfortunately never says “wow” in this movie) and Salma Hayek, Bliss is an unusual cinematic journey, in that has a decent premise and story but slowly descends into a strange rough patch-filled madness that even the cast and crew themselves don’t seem to understand.
“I have a picture in my head – an island, a home, a woman, and me,” protagonist Greg Wittle (Wilson) says at the beginning of the film. “I don’t know if any of it is real, but it has a feeling, and that feeling is real.” So consumed with these vague memories, Greg spends all his time making sketches of them at his office. Not all is well – either with Greg’s mind or the world – his daughter Emily (Nesta Cooper) reveals in a phone call that he’s divorced, but still deeply cares about her and her brother Arthur (Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.), and his boss Cameron (Joshua Leonard) constantly belittles him for “not being all there.” Told to report to Cameron immediately, Greg is fired. The meeting takes an unusual and dramatic turn when Greg…kills Cameron in revenge for the way he treated him. Because that’s the best solution you can come up with.
Greg soon finds himself in a nearby bar, where he encounters a mysterious woman named Isabel (Hayek). This is where the film really starts to let loose into its craziness – Isabel fills Greg’s head with notions that she is “real,” like him, but that most people in the world live in a simulation. To prove this, she demonstrates she has supernatural powers that Greg is immune to, including but not limited to making people fall and disappear, creating cars out of thin air, and changing her own appearance. If this doesn’t sound like The Matrix to you yet, I don’t know what to tell you. Unlike the movie it’s very clearly ripping off, the special effects in this are incredibly corny, but there’s some strange charm to how campy they are.
After Isabel seemingly uses these gifts to protect him from being arrested, she takes Greg to her “home” under a bridge. From there, the film grows weirder and weirder. Greg follows Isabel to get “tickets” to his real home, special drugs curated by a dealer named Kendo (Ronnie Chieng), and warps back to what Isabel tells him is “reality” – an island, just like the one he dreamed of. In this “reality,” he’s a scientist at a research foundation, living in the house he sketched, and married to Isabel for ten years. The drugs are hallucinogens developed by the lab, which can keep you in the simulation and alter your perceptions of reality, and the dealer is not a dealer but a “real” volunteer also in the simulation. All the memories he had of his “kids” and “job” were fake and part of a simulation, but the drugs, which he took in a variety of forms when he was in the simulation, made it seem real to him. Things get clearer, but not entirely clear, as he finds out about the ethics and implications of their study from none other than Seattle legend Bill Nye, playing a fictionalized version of himself working with the same science foundation, which adds to both the absurdity and the strange charm this film has.
For something as strange as it is, you have to applaud the cast for doing what they can with it. It’s nice to see Owen Wilson, who hasn’t been in much on the big screen recently, playing something he’s familiar with – a dude with a calm demeanor in the middle of all this madness. He adds some subtle touches to the film with his scenic presence that another actor in the role wouldn’t bring. Hayek is less effective as the film progresses, going from barely passable to laughably bad as she continues to entrance Wilson’s Greg. And although they don’t get much screen time, the supporting cast are extremely impactful as they add their small doses to the storyline.
On the other side of the camera, the work is a mixed bag. Mike Cahill has some obviously good ideas, but they aren’t tied together well and fall from grace into mediocrity and rip-off territory, becoming laughably bad at times. The ending is unsatisfying and completely changes your perception in a rather abrupt manner – if it kept the tone from the first half of the film towards the end, it would have been good, but the silliness and absurdity that characterize the second half feel like an unnatural transition until the ending, which returns to the starting tone, hits you like the back of a truck. That’s not to say that it isn’t complex or for what it is. Even if it’s only 80 minutes long and doesn’t have the largest budget, there’s just something about the weird and confusing nature of Bliss that you can’t hate.
2/5 STARS