What the #$*! Do We Know?!

Published: April 1, 2004

By DAVID BATES
Of the News-Register

Chance would have it that I was wading through Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" when I was told about an odd little film that sprints breathlessly into the territory popularized in the late 1970s by Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics" and Gary Zukav's "The Dancing Wu Li Masters."

Capra argued that Eastern mysticism, particularly Buddhism, and theoretical physics essentially made similar claims about the cosmos, in different languages.

The language of cinema presents the filmmaker who dares to go there with advantages and disadvantages. Both are on display in the new film "What the #$*! Do We Know?," a merry-go-ground of ruminations about the nature of reality by more than a dozen scientists, theologians and mystics.

The film opens Friday at Third Street Pizza Co.'s Moonlight Theater, which is the ideal place for this sort of thing. After the ride is over, everybody can order more pizza, sit down and debate whether the pepperoni exists.

The independent film is being marketed directly by the trio of filmmakers who directed it and shot it in Portland. It has generated something of a buzz on the art film circuit, with fans praising it in the same terms that people used to rave about Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and some returning for repeat viewings.

The film is a hybrid of genres and visual styles, employing a dizzying mix of live-action film and digital video, animation and graphics.

"What the #$*! Do We Know?" spends roughly half of its 108 minutes in documentary mode. The rest uses a fictional midlife crisis story as a narrative vehicle to explore the primacy of thought over matter.

Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin stars as Amanda, a divorced photographer who finds the "reality" of her mundane life unraveling in a series of weird experiences, which are punctuated by an encounter with a boy who asks, perhaps too earnestly, "How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?"

Washington filmmakers William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente say movie industry insiders told them, "There's no market for a film like this," a refrain that has a history of returning to bite the buttocks of those who utter it.

One has only to look at a few watermarks in the genre: In 1980, the late Carl Sagan's Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning "Cosmos" series on public television was viewed by more than 500 million people in 60 nations. In 1988, Hawking's "Brief History of Time" sold more than 9 million copies, was translated into 33 languages and was made into a film.

On the theological side of the cultural ledger, we have Dan Brown's gnostic thriller "The Da Vinci Code" perched atop the New York Times bestseller list for the last 53 weeks. Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" has made $315 million in little more than a month, guaranteeing that he will indeed work in Hollywood again.

So, yes, there is a mainstream audience for science and theology - and, as Capra's "Tao" and the "Matrix" films illustrate, there's also an appetite for hybrids of the two.

This one, however, has some curious product placement going on.

Among the physicists, neurologists and academics who expound the film's thesis is a charismatic woman who seems to get a bit more screen time than everyone else: She is new age icon JZ Knight, a resident of rural Washington who claims to be channeling a 35,000-year-old being from Atlantis named Ramtha.

Earlier this year, Oregon Public Broadcasting's Gretchen Lehmann reported that several of the scientists in the film are, in fact, affiliated with Knight's school - and that the $10 million film was largely financed by one of Knight's students.

Does this undermine the film? Not necessarily, although one can't help feeling a little cheated by filmmakers' deliberate decision to keep the identify of their talking heads, including Knight, under wraps until the end credits. When someone's talking to me, I like to know who is talking.

The film is engaging, and radical in its own way, although for all the talk about plunging down rabbit holes, it doesn't so much dive into the abyss as it scampers around the edges, occasionally peering at a breathtaking landscape that deserves more methodical exploration - at least, more so than physicists gushing, "Quantum physics is the physics of possibility!"

Unfortunately, no single voice emerges as an authoritative guide to make sense of the material, which deserves to be rooted in the context of the history of science and philosophy, although the scientists' enthusiasm is certainly infectious. The scenes with Matlin, meanwhile, have a genuine humanity to them and use Portland locations effectively.

I'm rapidly approaching the word limit for a review, with much left to say. "What the #$*! Do We Know?" raises so many issues - within the film itself, the manner of its production and distribution, and the social context in which we watch it - that much more deserves to be said. That's the sort of movie it is: To its credit and detriment, it is, literally, too much information.

"What the #$*! Do We Know?" Directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente. Starring: Marlee Matlin, Elaine Hendrix, Barry Newman, Robert Bailey Jr., John Ross Bowie, Armin Shimerman. 108 minutes. Unrated. The film has maybe a couple swear words, and a fleeting glimpse of a sex scene. Probably fine for teens and up.

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