Every George Miller movie is a Mad Max movie
George Miller’s lavish fantasy movie Three Thousand Years of Longing begins with a warning. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), the film’s protagonist, warns viewers that the story she’s about to tell beggars belief — and yet it nonetheless happened to her. So to better present it to an audience inoculated against wonder, she decides to tell it as a fairy tale: one of the oldest kinds of stories, where the veracity of an account has little bearing on whether it’s true.
Much like Alithea’s story, the career of the director telling that story is difficult to believe, and seemingly unreal. The breadth of George Miller’s filmography is staggering and slim at the same time. You could watch all of his movies in a weekend and find gonzo comedy, seminal action cinema, brutally intimate drama, and landmark children’s movies. Since 1979, the idiosyncratic, soft-spoken director has surfaced roughly a dozen times, in each case to present a uniquely polarizing work. How does the man known for presenting one of the most iconic, violent wastelands in cinema also turn around and make Happy Feet, or Babe: Pig in the City?
Three Thousand Years of Longing is another curveball from a man who doesn’t know how to throw any other kind of pitch. In this phase of his career, Miller has been lionized, his reputation solidified through the wild success of Mad Max: Fury Road. That 2015 film is now widely regarded as the very best of its decade. It’s a thrilling, thoughtful action movie that was received with amazement and enthusiasm — and has since steadily grown in estimation to become regarded as an easy addition to the canon of cinematic greats.
Miller’s latest movie is nothing like Fury Road. Three Thousand Years of Longing is a quiet film, a
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