"What do you do
when you look to the left and to the right
And find no clues
To the questions you ask yourself at night..."
Eureka is a retelling of the Midas story - man tries to be rich, man gets rich, man loses daughter, man becomes unhappy. Jack McCann (Gene Hackman) becomes the richest man in the world after discovering a river of gold in the Yukon (in one of the most stunning sequences I've seen in a long time), but for all his money fails to stop his daughter Tracy (Theresa Russell), the only love of his life, from marrying a man he hates. The result is pain, grief, heartache, anguish and, ultimately, the violent murder of McCann.
But the similarities are superficial. The Midas tale is about value, of course - a quasi-literal fable lesson of how all that glitters is not gold. But, for all the prominence given to the gold, the story of Eureka is not about value, but motivation: what happens after you have achieved your life's sole purpose? What happens after you have found the gold, metaphysical or otherwise? And what do you do when you ask yourself those questions and can find no answers?
When Garry Kasparov won his momentous World Championship in 1984 against Anatoly Karpov, the wife of a fellow grandmaster and former world champion (Spassky? Botvinnik?) said to him, "I pity you, Garry." Kasparov looked at her in surprise: "Why? This is the greatest moment of my life." The woman answered: "That is why - because you have already achieved it."
In the film, it is strongly suggested that Jack McCann faced the same impasse: Tracy, in what I felt was a painfully awkward courtroom scene (even if every other reviewer raved about it - I cringed throughout: she can't act, her voice is too raucous, the script was embarrassingly gawky...), cries out: "He was dead a long time ago - he died when he found all that gold." The idea is certainly conceivable, yet the film is never explicit about it: Nicolas Roeg started out as a film editor, and his craft shows - his cuts are all elegant, evocative and extremely imaginative. The man who found all that gold turned into the unhappy man in one fluid flash-forward - we have no idea what happened inbetween. All we know since seeing him in Yukon is that he has bought his own Caribbean island and he now hates the man his daughter is seeing. But what did he do afterwards, what ambitions did he seek, what questions did he ask? And was he really already dead?
What do you do when you ask yourself questions which you can't answer? What do you do in that huge void? And is death really such a respite?
"I'll be sending a letter to God."
("Letter To God", Sheryl Crow)
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