Bliss

Bliss
Starring Owen Wilson, Salma Hayek, Nesta Cooper, Madeline Zima
Directed by Mike Cahill

What is bliss? It seems to me that the concept of bliss is a sense of willful naivete, a complete understanding of the world and its quarrels yet producing an ignorance to it, hence the saying "ignorance is bliss." To be blissful - in my opinion - is to be happy in the sense of being self-absorbed, where you only care about yourself and what makes you happy instead of the happiness of others, or caring about the plight of others. It's a selfish emotion that puts blinders on your sight to see only what you want to see - and in the case of Mike Cahill's "Bliss," it seems to be an apt comparison.

Greg Wittle (Owen Wilson) is not having a blissful life. He's newly divorced, estranged from his son, has a strained relationship with his daughter Emily (Nesta Cooper) who wants him to be in her life but he seems to be missing it, and has just lost his job - but then things get worse, leading him to a small bar to drink away his existence. It's there he meets homeless woman Isabel (Salma Hayek), who accosts him by claiming that he's real, unlike everyone else, because she has a power that allows her to mess with people who "aren't real" because she created this world with unintended consequences. After she showcases her power, Greg is still apprehensive but more hopeful that she'll help him out of his current situation, and she tells him by ingesting yellow crystals he'll be able to harness his own ability to mess with those "not real," and the two begin a crystal-fueled relationship that finds them all over town messing with people as they slowly fall in love, all the while having Emily on their heels in search of her missing father. Greg starts to become wary of Isabel's claims, saying that he has to rely on her entirely, so she tells him they'll leave this make-believe world by ingesting special blue crystals that will take them to the "real world," and when they do, they awaken in a bright, beautiful world free of violence, poverty, and stupidity - but is this really the real world?

"Bliss" was marketed as a science-fiction romance, but there's very little of all of that in the actual movie. If it was marketed right, it could've ended up being better than what it was, but going into it expecting one thing - and getting something totally different - was tonally off-putting. Not to mention that the concept that Mike Cahill conceived of was so convoluted, confusing, and needlessly expounded upon by Hayek's Isabel ad-nausea for the first half of the film, which is unfortunate because the second half was halfway decent, but by that time I didn't really care as much as I probably should've.

The entire concept of the film revolves around Isabel, who seemingly created a negative world for people in the real world to go to in order to appreciate the world they live in, even though their world is pretty much perfect in every way. She discovers Greg in this fake world and is surprised to see that he's real, even though technically she should've known he was there the whole time, and then goes on long speeches about the powers she has, the world they live in, and how to get back and forth with the use of special crystals. The second half occurs after they enter the "real world" and struggle with the fake world that the seemingly brought with them, even though if she created this world, it shouldn't be bleeding over to the real world - and I'm confusing myself as much as I was confused about the movie as a whole.

You can tell the underlying theme of the film from the start as something much more important than some sci-fi adventure or romantic romp, and that's the issue of drug use and the effects it has on not just yourself, but the people around you. Greg finds Isabel as a crazed homeless woman, but she slowly starts talking her sense into him and convincing him to take the crystals with her, and soon he finds himself in a new, blissful euphoria where everything is bright and alive, in a world that's drab and dark (kudos to the cinematographer who obviously contrasted the two "worlds" with distinctly differing color palettes). In the fake world, both Greg and Isabel look like homeless drug addicts, and you sense the worry in Greg's daughter Emily who traverses the seedier side of town in search of her missing father. It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or a scientist like Bill Nye, who makes a strange cameo in the film) to get what the director is hinting at, and it's this concept that would've made for a much better, darker, and more powerful film. Instead, we get an over-bloated film that tries to be smarter than it was, a film that offered some decent ideals but shrouded them in a mindless jumble that's anything but blissful.

Serving more as an obvious allegory to the dangers of drug addiction, "Bliss" tries to tell a story intelligently, but ultimately drowns in its own hubris, rendering the more impressive second act mute since any blissful feelings you had for the film dissipated by that time.

The Score: C