“Bliss” is a frustrating magical mystery tour
★★¼ Rated R. 103 minutes. On Amazon Prime Video.
In the press notes for his new film “Bliss,” writer-director Mike Cahill calls it “a love story and an adventure story and a father-daughter story. It’s also a science-fiction movie about life inside a simulation.”
That’s probably as good and as efficient of a summary as you’re going to find for this wholly intriguing, often-engaging, sometimes-frustrating and ultimately incomplete-feeling movie that lands on Amazon’s Prime video platform this week.
Starring the appealing pair of Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek, “Bliss” is enough of an unusual cinematic journey that we want to allow it its rough patches — or at least some of them.
“I have a picture in my head of a place — home — a woman,” Wilson’s character, Greg Wittle, says in the movie’s opening narration. “I don’t know if any of it’s real, but it has a feeling — and the feeling’s real.”
So consumed with these vague memories is Greg that he’s spending all his time in his office at what appears to be a middle-management job — at a company called Technical Difficulties — making sketches of them.
Cahill begins to show us all is not well — either with Greg’s mind or his world (or both) — from the start, with some visual hints but mainly through the character’s behavior. There’s also a call from his daughter, Emily (Nesta Cooper), during which we learn he is divorced from her mother,
Greg gets fired from his job and finds himself in a nearby bar, where he encounters Hayek’s Isabel Clemens. This is where “Bliss” really starts to let loose, Isabel filling Greg’s head with notions that while he and she are “real,” everyone else in the bar — and most of the people in the world — are part of a simulation. To prove this, she demonstrates she has supernatural powers allowing her to, say, make a bar patron fall down while noting Greg is immune from her abilities.
After Isabel seemingly uses otherworldly gifts to help him out of his present predicament, Greg agrees to follow her to her “home” of sorts — a spot of city land near a bridge where she has a tent and more.
From there, “Bliss” grows only weirder and wilder, Greg following Isabel on an adventure that leads to strange places — including the dream home he’s so diligently been sketching.
Wilson is ideally cast here, as he brings his familiar calm on-screen demeanor to a character in the middle of a lot of craziness.
Hayek (“Frida,” “Like a Boss”) is less effective as “Bliss” progresses, but she’s very convincing as this bewitching woman who entrances Greg.
On the other side of the camera, Cahill’s work is a mixed bag. The writer and director of 2011’s “Another Earth” and 2014’s “I Origins” obviously has some interesting ideas, but here he fails to tie them together as tightly as you’d hope.
That, however, isn’t to say the conclusion of “Bliss” is unsatisfying. It works, at least relatively well.
Plus, you can’t shake the feeling “Bliss” may have more to say, to reveal, to the viewer on a repeat viewing.