Viewed scene by scene and shot
by shot, Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka unfolds in a relatively linear manner, at
least compared to his most famous works, but it’s ultimately as productively strange and
challenging as any of them. The first section depicts its protagonist,
prospector Jack McCann, achieving his dreams of striking it rich in the Yukon,
to the extent of becoming maybe the world’s richest man: twenty years or so
later he’s occupying his own Caribbean island (isolated from the war raging
elsewhere) with an alcoholic wife and a daughter who frustrates him with her
choice of relationship; resisting the pressure from a business associate, in
turn under the thumb of gangsters, to sell off a portion of his land for
development. Roeg dramatizes the finding of the gold in extravagantly cosmic
manner, as if McCann had pierced the mind of God; much of what follows might
seem deliberately flat and protracted, underlining the contrast between the
fulfilment of finding the gold and the relative emptiness of having it (Robert
Service’s famous lines to this effect provide the film’s final words). The
film’s last half hour pushes even further, to and beyond complete erasure:
McCann is murdered (his body gleefully burned, as if to ward off supernatural
residue) and Roeg immerses us in the subsequent trial, in all its stodgy
formality and underlying hollowness, eventually boiling matters down to pure
melodrama. That contrast between finding and having seems resonant as a
reflection on creativity, leading to a final note of simultaneous renewal and
demise, tinged with a sense of transmigration, as if the restlessness in McCann
had become embodied in another (there’s also a suggestion that McCann never
survived his great find, which would render everything that follows a sort of distended fantasy). Despite the joyous promise of discovery in its
title then, the film resists easy closure and coherence - how could it not, when
that would only guarantee that we share McCann’s sense of reductive loss…?
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