WHAT THE #$*! DO WE KNOW?
Direct by William Arntz, Betsy Chase, and Mark Vicente
Opens Oct 20
Garneau Theatre
*** (out of five)

If you’re at all hip to the metaphysical patter that directors William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente are putting down in What the #$*! Do We Know?, their quasi-documentary investigation of the spiritual ramifications of quantum physics, you’ll be surprised that many of the people whose opinions they solicit are neither physicists nor theologians by vocation. I guess this even constitutes a spoiler of sorts, since you don’t know until the end who you’ve been listening to for close to two hours, but it turns out that many of the talking heads in What the #$*!? come from medical backgrounds. Having probed the mysteries of the body, they’ve moved on to ponder how the mind and body work together and how the functioning of 5 billion some-odd bodies and minds constitutes reality.

The answer takes a while to unravel, but the rough consensus achieved in cutting between experts is that while materialism and many modern religions allow believers to externalize responsibility, even cast themselves as victims of fate, quantum physics tells us that there is nothing to observe without an observer and that, in fact, how and what we think is closely tied to how the world is. This may be an easy precept to buy into, but you’ll have to follow the movie a lot farther down the rabbit hole than that. Using computer animation and dramatization, What the #$*!? blenders up mind, soul, body, particle physics, neurophysiology, psychiatry and a slightly patchouli-scented New Age earnestness to posit a world that need only escape from its dependence on what has already happened to view the limitless possibilities of human potential.

Even if you aren’t in the market for a new belief system, there are some fascinating ideas at play here and, at the very least, a reminder that reality is far from fixed, however rigid and predictable it may appear. That these utterances are coming from people with varied intellectual groundings dispels the taint of proselytizing and makes it seem like philosophizing from a very broad perspective.

But for someone without a basic grounding in quantum physics and/or eastern spirituality, the steady flow of ideas through the film will be like drinking from a fire hose–there are just too many complicated and abstract ideas moving by too quickly for the complete novice. The movie tries to solve this problem by presenting a narrative featuring Amanda (Marlee Matlin), a hearing-impaired photographer whose unhappy past–she caught her husband cheating–has hopelessly discoloured her outlook on the world. As various smarty-pantses wax eloquent on the physiological substrates of mind and emotion and the relative immateriality of matter, these concepts are spelled out in Amanda’s hurry-and-worry life, including a cheeky sequence with animated peptides running amok in her body as she becomes tipsy photographing a Polish wedding.

While this device breaks up the talking heads and provides an opportunity to inject some humour, the Amanda narrative is really quite cheesy. Matlin is not an unappealing presence, but for much of the movie her facial expression indicates that she’s in the near vicinity of a really bad smell. Later, when she has a few epiphanies and gets the idea that her mental and emotional habits are weighing heavily on her, she starts to glow a bit and can see her alternative existences playing out around her in tacky CGI, which is when some viewers might get the uncomfortable feeling that Scientologists are waiting outside the theatre doors to administer personality tests and help viewers attain the state of "clear." The cumulative effect of the Amanda narrative is that the filmmakers aren’t just philosophically inclined, but intensely smarmy.

But there are a surfeit of heady questions bouncing around in What the #$*! Do We Know?, some of which are bound to give you something to mull over after the lights come up–even if one of those questions is, what does a deaf person need with a cell phone and an answering machine?