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The cliché’d title is supposed to express wonderment, but the only thing this sort-of documentary about quantum physics will make you say "What the #$*!" about is the shoddy job it does of illuminating its subject. Highbrow jargon, platitudes, and existential technobabble spew across the screen from expert talking heads as the topic bounces from possibility to density of matter to alternate reality and, eventually, God and sex. The most "unreal" segments, however, are the dramatizations of these ideas as seen in the banal daily doings of Amanda (Marlee Matlin, the deaf actress who won a Best Actress Oscar for Children of a Lesser God back in 1986), a hard-working photographer who spends the entirety of the film looking perplexed and beleaguered. Most of the vignettes are so woeful, they’re laughable; a few rise to the level of inadvertent camp. The best you can do is think of What the #$*! as an ersatz redux of Errol Morris’s A Brief History of Time (1991). I guess directors William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente felt that some brazen sex and a riotous Polish wedding might further clarify the arcane concepts. They don’t. (111 minutes)
BY TOM MEEK
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