Other characters drift in and out of the story, alleviating or increasing the hero's irritability and spiritual malaise. The curvy blond Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry) rescues Quohen at a party when he nearly chokes on an olive, and proves responsible for getting him reassigned to work at home, then keeps reappearing in his life, eventually providing him with his signature elf suit and then being revealed as a secret Internet striptease artist. Many of the characters evoke indelible players from Gilliam's "Brazil": there's a Walter Mitty or Winston Smith-type wise-yet-meek everyman (the hero), an obnoxious mediocrity of a supervisor (David Thewlis), and a blandly intimidating boss (Matt Damon), whose character is identified only as Management, and whose natty suits, owlish eyeglasses, grey hair and dulcet voice make him seem like Peter Bogdanovich's all-powerful kid brother.

There are some twists and turns in the plot, all having to do with the true meaning and purpose of the Zero Theorem. At the end, the mysteries are laid out for us methodically, as if we're seeing the philosophical version of a drawing-room mystery where the murderer is the Frankensteinian post-capitalist society we've all gotten way too comfortable with, and the victim is the human soul.

I wish, however, that the characters were allowed to be as well as to represent, if that makes sense. Gilliam's other films, even the bad ones, all managed to balance the need to deliver aphorisms and lessons against the obligation to involve us in the characters' plights. Every character in this movie remains stubbornly and elusively abstract. We know what everybody stands for, but we never really know them. After a while you start to miss the aching humanity of Sam Lowry in "Brazil" or the lovers in "Twelve Monkeys," or the exquisitely fragile energy of Robin Williams in Gilliam's "The Fisher King."

The movie's at its most engaging when it's just showing us the world that causes Quohen such distress. An early scene in which the hero leaves his abode and tries to walk along a city thoroughfare while a video ticker on the side of a building tracks him with tailored sales pitch is a marvelous comment on how technology turns every environment into a retail outlet, and every person into a target of opportunity. (It's like that moment in "Minority Report" where Tom Cruise walks through a mall while ads chirp at him.) There are some exquisitely blocked and executed long takes, and a virtual-fantastical interlude on a tropical beach that ranks with the best scenes Gilliam has directed. In its better moments, "Zero Theorem" does seem like the work of a brilliantly cranky cartoonist who's spent years obsessing over what the world has become, then finally sat down, opened a sketchbook and started drawing. The problem is, once you've watched "Zero Theorem," you'd rather go look at the sketchbook.