REVIEW: Reminiscence

I'm writing this review already aware that this film has been pronounced dead on the box office scene. Alas, such is the fate for many a midbudget film, even before a global shutdown. Can I understand why this particular player in that game didn't break the barrier? Perhaps a little. Lisa Joy's new film, Reminiscence, sometimes trips over its own plotline. But despite that, the film swims in cynicism and grace in a way that shows and reveals a depth most elusive in the modern cinema scene. Perhaps we've written it off too soon.

The film is best described as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo set in a near but bleak future. Climate change has flooded the streets of Miami, and now that Orlando is underwater, people dive into their own memories for entertainment. This process is enabled through advanced technology and mental technicians like Nick (Hugh Jackman). One day an alluring bar singer named Mae (Rebecca Fergusson) enlists the help of Nick and draws him into a romance that feels too vivid for a world teetering on the apocalypse.

Nick thinks he has found his island in the storm until Mae vanishes without warning. The slightest inquiry into her disappearance unearths disquieting truths about who she was. Nick's only clue lies in the memories he has of her, and he can only swim in the transient recollections of a woman that he never really knew for so long before he starts drowning.

The nostalgic yearnings of this film recall old noir films of the 1940s, but with a sci-fi dressing. Some of the plotlines in this mystery are admittedly more interesting than others. The love affair between Nick and Mae supposedly overlaps with another plotline about corrupt politicians and policemen, but even now I'm having difficulty remembering all the threads in that tangle. When the story does come together and you find out what the film was wanting to say all along, it approaches something like profundity. For that, I can't fault the film too much, no matter how uninterested I was in the drug underworld of a post-Disney World Florida.

The film could have made a comment on the bleak outlook of the world without setting this story in a fallen future, but then we wouldn't have had some of the most interesting visuals ever seen in a mystery-thriller. Dystopia has never looked so serene. You don't see this kind of mid-budget design work in theaters anymore. It's always exploding spaceships or nothing.

Jackman spends most of the film mixing anger and sadness in varying values. I wouldn't call this the highlight of his career, but his cynicism and hope interact in a way that keeps the viewer searching.

Jackman's billing will no doubt unfortunately drown some of the other notable performances within this film. These include Thandiwe Newton's Emily--Nick's coworker, anchor, and almost friend--and Cliff Curtis' Booth--the corrupt officer enacting the spiraling plot in which Mae is entangled.

Mae herself is more of an idea than a character for most of her screentime, a sultry ghost for Nick to pine over, though Fergusson's performance does deepen as the veils fall and the woman behind the phantom comes into focus.

If the mystery does work, it works mostly by keeping certain plot features and characters undefined until the last minute. The tension comes less from reversals and red herrings than it does from keeping the magician's cloak over the mystery box for as long as possible. In that way, the film denies the viewer some of the best pleasures of the mystery film.

But at the same time, the mystery element is just draping over an entirely different story. The movie is psychological in other ways. At its heart, this is the story of a man learning about how to relate to his own conceptions of perfection and beauty in a world that is overflowing with disappointment. The film stops just short of saying something truly profound about the beautiful overlaps between loss, happiness, illusion, and memory, but when you spend so long in this film's conversation, you start to hear what you know to be true anyways.

These kinds of midbudget, non-franchise, adult-minded films are themselves like illusory phantoms that appear and disappear as though they were pawns in a larger scheme out of our control. When you chase their shadows, you find their faults and contradictions, but the search unearths pools of beautiful truth just the same.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: You, Me & Tuscany

I've learned not to be ungrateful for movies like You, Me & Tuscany . It's the kind of picture that can be easily written off as predictable or derivative. And Kat Cairo's film definitely rides on some genre shorthand. Halle Bailey's Anna has very similar flaws to most rom-com heroines as this untethered 20-something trying to figure out how to stretch a check. And the story itself lands about where every one of these movies do. (Though, remind me, how does every Tom Cruise movie end?) After the screening concluded, one of the ladies sitting behind me even said something much like, "Yeah, that was a lot like While You Were Sleeping ." But she didn't sound smug in her assessment. Her pronouncement was more encoded with the excitement that comes with discovery--the realization that she had found something like a worthy successor. And as a fan of Sandra Bullock's second-best rom-com, I was inclined to agree with this la...

All The Ways Sunset Boulevard Has Aged Gracefully

So, stop me if you’ve heard this before: Hollywood has a dark side. Particularly in the wake of something like #MeToo or the double strikes of 2023, you can really get a sense for just how famishing, even degrading, it can be trying to make a living in Hollywood. But of course, it all goes back much further than those. One of my very first essays for this blog was a catalogue of all the ways Hollywood ravaged Judy Garland , to point to another example. Yet for all its mess, we cannot take our eyes off of Hollywood, or the people who build it. Stardom in particular becomes a popular focal point—what is it really like being on the other side of all that spotlighting? And Hollywood has naturally supplied the market with all sorts of imaginings for this as well. Thus, each generation gets its own version of A Star is Born. John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man (1952) Ty Burr wrote in his landmark work,...

Reveling in the Mixed Messages of Miss Congeniality

In book ten of Metamorphoses, Greek poet Ovid tells the tale of Pygmalion, a talented sculptor living in the height of ancient Greek society. According to the story, Pygmalion’s sculpting prowess was so impeccable that one of his pieces, a marble woman he christened Galatea, was said to be the lovelier than any woman of flesh and blood. Pygmalion was so taken by his creation that he brought her exotic gifts, kissed her marble cheeks, even prepared a luxurious bed for her. Pygmalion so pined to be loved by Galatea that he prayed to the goddess Aphrodite to allow Galatea to reciprocate his love and affection. Aphrodite was apparently in a good mood that day, so she granted Pygmalion’s wish, giving life to Galatea, whom he then wed. The story of Pygmalion is in essence the story of a man who creates his own idealized woman out of whole cloth (or more appropriately, marble), endowing her with all the traits that he finds appealing or alluring. The story also provides a m...

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Westerns Riding off into the Sunset

In both my Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge! pieces, I made some comment about the musical as the genre that receives the least love in the modern era. I stand by that, but I acknowledge there is one other genre for which you could potentially make a similar case. I am referring of course to the western film. See, musicals at least have Disney keeping them on life alert, and maybe one day we’ll get the Wicked movie Universal has been promising us for ten years [FUTURE EDIT: All good things, folks ]. But westerns don’t really have a place in the modern film world. Occasionally we’ll get films like No Country for Old Men, which use similar aesthetics and themes, but they are heavily modified from the gun-blazing-horseback-racing-wide-open-desert w esterns of old. Those died, oddly enough, around the same time musicals fell out of fashion. Professors Susan Kord and Elizabeth Krim...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

The Case for Pre-Ragnarök Thor

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become such a fixture of pop culture that it’s difficult to imagine that the whole ordeal was actually a massive crapshoot. The biggest conceit of the MCU has been its ability to straddle a thousand different heroes—each with their own stories, casts, and universes—into one cohesive whole. It’s a balancing act like nothing that’s ever been attempted before in the hundred years of filmmaking. A lot of the brand’s success can be attributed to the way that each individual story adheres to the rules of its own specific universe. The Captain America movies serve a different purpose than the Spiderman movies, and all the movies in the Captain America trilogy have to feel like they belong together. There are, of course, questions posed by this model. In a network of films that all exist to set up other ...

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history. Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this. I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines. The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.” Now,...

The Belle Complex

As Disney fandom increasingly moves toward the mainstream, the discussions and questions that travel around the community become increasingly nuanced and diverse. Is the true color of Aurora's dress blue or pink? Is it more fun to sit in the back or the front on Big Thunder Mountain? Is the company's continued emphasis on producing content for Disney+ negatively impacting not only their output but the landscape for theatrical release as a whole? However, on two things, the fandom is eternally united. First, Gargoyles was a masterpiece in television storytelling and should have experienced a much longer run than it did. Second, Belle's prom dress in the 2017 remake was just abominable. While overwhelmingly successful at the box office, the 2017 adaptation is also a bruise for many in the Disney community. Even right out the gate, the film came under fire for a myriad of factors: the auto-tuned soundtrack, Ewan McGregor's flimsy accent, the distracting plot...

The Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Question

I spend a lot of effort in this space trying to champion the musical genre as the peak of cinematic achievement. And so it sometimes surprises my associates to find out that, no, I wasn't at all raised in a household that particularly favored musicals. I wasn't the kid who went out for the annual school musical or anything. My environment wasn't exactly hostile toward these things, but it actually did very little to nurture my study of the genre. Cinderella (1950) I obviously had exposure through things like the Disney animated musicals, which absolutely had a profound effect on the larger musical genre . But I didn’t see The Sound of Music until high school, and I didn’t see Singin’ in the Rain until college. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , though, it was just always there. And so I guess that's really where I got infected. I'm referring to the 1954 musical directed by Stanley Donen with music by Gene de Paul ,...

REVIEW: The Running Man

A lot of people have wanted to discuss Edgar Wright's new The Running Man outing as "the remake" of the 1987 film (with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a very different Ben Richards). As for me, I find it more natural to think of it as "another adaptation of ..." Even so, my mind was also on action blockbusters of the 1980s watching this movie today. But my thoughts didn't linger so much on the Paul Michael Glaser film specifically so much as the general action scene of the day. The era of Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell and the he-men they brought to life. These machine-gun wielding, foul-mouthed anarchists who wanted to tear down the establishment fed a real need for men with a lot of directionless anger. This was, as it would turn out, the same era in which Stephen King first published The Running Man , telling the story of a down-on-his luck man who tries to rescue his wife and daughter from poverty by winning a telev...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog