The place from where tides flow

Rating: Null/10 (21 August 2011)

Most viewers will find this a bloated, stuffy mess, with good reason I think, and will be able to easily write off as yet another unnecessary sequel, with mechanical reworkings.
But let's take a look at the stage of the film. Center stage is Jack Sparrow with his gallery of quirky mannerisms, the off-beat charm that has sustained the series from the get go. The wrap-around is a disposable pageant, with every now and then a different backdrop. Shepherded next to him are two of the best 'elephants' in the acting biz right now - Rush and McShane. They both understand what it is all about, so they relish their part with grandiloquent pantomime. They inhabit costumes, not people.
So, yes, no one is going to think twice about Tides. Viewers who have learned to distinguish between Malick as 'high art' and Hollywood as a roadshow of cheap entertainments will likely turn it off after thirty minutes. We've seen elsewhere Captain Sparrow evade hanging, be marshalled into an impossible journey, and the series of ironic twists that eventually resolve it.
But if, on the other hand, we are not merely passing through cinema and have, instead, invested ourselves in a certain worldview and are looking for its representation, that is to say we're not looking at image for its technical accomplishment but as space for contemplation; then, with the right implications, every movie becomes a potential support for meditation.
So, let's take a look at the stage again. We'll need to improvise a little because the design is not by the hand of a master filmmaker, the metaphor is topsy turvy but there nonetheless.
First, the twist within the narrative given to us as a charade of deception, whereupon the players disguise themselves into what they intend to invoke in the stage of the film. Hitchcock was a cosummate master of this, the ball masque, moreover so because we became so engrossed into the surface of the thrilling escapade that, perhaps, it didn't register until later. Each objective to be accomplished - what was called the McGuffin - was merely the ritual trinket around which the players wrapped themselves.
Into this, the foreshadowing that things are not what they seem, the very meaning to contemplate. There is all the talk about fate between the participants, do we write our own, consign to the narrative above, or occasionally cheat as best we can. So, here is fashioned a narrative about these narratives, as an attempt to surmise the metaphysical blueprint from which they flow - the one tide that gives rise to all the rest. At this point it's merely wordplay, but notice how it's visualized inside.
The clue laid out with regards to this, in spite of everything else, is a stunning conceit. A closet full of miniature ships in bottles, each its own bubble of a universe.
So, the journey to discover the Fountain of Youth becomes this journey to the place where narratives are formed, where the tides that govern the soul flow from. This is not random stuff. Notice the threshold that separates the two worlds; the waters now reversed, flowing backwards, upwards.
Oh, the Catholic Spaniards show up there to destroy this temple of ancient, secret knowledge, which is its own off-hand comment on destructive religion. But the movie doesn't end there.
It ends with two scenes set in unspecificed beaches. In the first, Sparrow disentangles himself from the narrative we have been watching, at the promise of love from Penelope Cruz the music in the background, about to swell into tricly crescendo, is abruptly cut off as he saunters off. In the next and final one, Sparrow, who could have obtained the secret knowledge - the eternal incarnate - has instead settled for a bottle with a miniature ship, the bottle that contains his own reality. He will not go on - just yet, at least- to join a fictional pantheon of heroes, but the possibilities to write his own narrative remain limitless.
Raoul Ruiz died yesterday. I'd like to think he would have found merit here. He could have made the movie into what it has promise to be. Wojciech Has. Peter Greenaway; any of these people with their notions about sailing inwards. But alas, it's a Bruckheimer/Disney project, and we'll have to improvise our way through the noisy attractions.