The basic idea behind this film was to combine a standard murder mystery
with a heady academic overlay, as filtered through pop culture. Imagine a
hybrid of The Name of the Rose and The DaVinci Code.
The setting is modern day Oxford, where an old woman's murdered body is
found simultaneously by a mathematics teacher (John Hurt) and one of his new
American students (Elijah Wood). The first murder comes with the first
puzzle in a promised series, so it appears that the murder is the first of
several which will be committed by a serial murderer who will follow an
intricate sequence of symbols. The professor and his student are intrigued and undertake to solve the
series, while the police come to suspect that one or both of them are involved
in the murders.
Hurt and Frodo spend a great deal of the film's running time discussing
mathematics and its application in the real world. Hurt's professor takes the position
that the abstract perfection of mathematics and symbolic logic inevitably
prove useless outside of the virtual universe of the mind, because real life
is too filled with uncertainty, randomness, and acts committed by irrational
minds. Frodo argues that while absolute certainty may be impossible in the
natural world, one may come close enough that the lingering vestige of
uncertainty is virtually irrelevant in practical terms. We do not know for
sure that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow, for example, but the
likelihood of other
possibilities is so infinitesimal that there is no reasonable case for doubt, and therefore every reason to build upon
an assumption that it will happen.
There's plenty of name-dropping from the world of philosophy, with
Heisenberg and Wittgenstein getting top billing, but unlike the far superior
The Name of the Rose, none of that jibber-jabber was really integrated tightly
into the
solution to the murders. It is not entirely irrelevant, but is mainly backdrop, which makes it of interest mainly
to those few of us who took philosophy courses even when they were not
required. There is also a little bit of name-dropping from the world of
mathematics in which these two academics are actually supposed to dwell, but
in that field the names have been changed. The film shows an Oxford professor
solving "Bormat's last theorem," presumably because various academics would
carp about any fallacies in a proof of Fermat's famous unsolved postulation,
or perhaps because somebody (Andrew Wilkes) was acknowledged to have actually
solved the real problem between the time the script was written and the time
it was produced. Or maybe Fermat's estate was demanding a royalty check. Beats
me. At
any rate, the sub-plot about the professor who solved the enigma posed by the
fictional "Bormat" was utterly irrelevant to the murder mystery.
It's a thriller which may bore you to tears in the first half
if you are not interested in epistemology and/or advanced math, and then will frustrate you in the
second half with some of its more preposterous inventions, including an
outrageous coincidence involving the third symbol in the eventual series of four, each
of which corresponds to one incident of murder. The second half of the film also includes
a love scene between Frodo and Leonor Watling which is one of the most awkward
ever filmed since
Liberace's
smooching in Sincerely Yours, but in spite of that, men may well find Ms Watling's
impressively curvy figure to be the film's strongest asset.
The solution is certainly not lacking in complexity. I always try to solve
a murder mystery along with the investigators, and I hadn't a clue on this one
until the curtain was pulled aside. You may find the solution quite
interesting, if convoluted and unlikely. It is reasonably clever and I guess
its unpredictability was part of the point the author was making with with all
the earlier blathering about randomness. The one thing I found most
interesting about the solution was that the student and professor
eventually realized that each of them was responsible for one of the four
incidents, although neither of them actually committed a murder. That fact
revealed them to be the proverbial butterflies whose fluttering wings eventually disrupt
weather systems on the other side of the planet, as they had debated ad nauseum earlier in the film.
