Which Is Worse, Forgetting or Remembering?
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
Memory (Michel Franco) rated R 90 min.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: Sylvia (Jessica Chastain): a single mother of teenage daughter Anna (Brooke Timber)—tensions between them as Mom refuses to let daughter date; a social worker at a home for mentally-challenged adults; an appreciated member of her local (in NYC) AA group; mostly keeps to herself due to horrid memories of being raped when she was 12. Younger sister Olivia (Merritt Wever) talks her into going to a high-school reunion where she mostly sits alone, doesn’t do much, but is troubled by a man (we later find out is Saul [Peter Sarsgaard]) who sits close to her, smiles at her, but then follows her as she’s headed home by herself on a dark night in the big city. When she gets inside and locks up she can see he’s out there, doesn’t leave even when the rain comes. Next morning Sylvia finds him still outside, drenched, not too responsive even just to her basic questions.
However, she does learn some info about his identity, so she calls his brother, Isaac (Josh Charles), to come retrieve him. She goes along with them to Isaac’s home (Saul lives there too) where she gets an apology from Isaac about the situation, learns Saul has early onset dementia that easily gets him confused, unable to make many new memories or recall older ones. Sylvia then takes Saul to a park, wants to know why he followed her home, but he says he has no idea, doesn’t even know who she is; this angers her because she says he was with a group of older boys, led by 18-year-old Ben Goldberg, who raped her, with Saul forcing fellatio on her. He says he remembers none of it which at first angers her as she storms off, but then she reconsiders, comes back, helps him get home. Sara (Elsie Fisher), Isaac’s daughter, offers Sylvia an additional job of caring for Saul during the day when Isaac can’t be there; she accepts after Olivia convinces her that Saul didn’t come to their school until after she’d transferred elsewhere, so her long-ago-memory of him must be mistaken, she apologizes. As the days go on, Sylvia becomes close with Saul even as he also befriends Anna.
One day, Sylvia and Saul fall asleep on the couch holding each other more in friendship than love, discovered by Sara; this situation disturbs Sylvia anyway, so she terminates the job with Saul, only for him to come to her place where they begin a romance, much to Isaac’s dismay. Anna then seeks out her grandmother, Samantha (Jessica Harper), against Sylvia’s edict that there be no such contact; Grandma tells the kid Sylvia was a wild child when she was a teenager. All of this comes to a head one day at Olivia’s home where Sylvia is confronted by Samantha, upset both that her daughter’s now involved with a man with mental issues and that she’s been kept away from her granddaughter. Samantha accuses Sylvia of lying about her sexual assault in school, Sylvia countering that her late father (Samantha’s now married to Robert [Tom Hammond]) used to rape her as well, with Olivia verifying how the man used to take her sister into his closed room. Sylvia tells Samantha the lack of her mother believing her about Dad is what later drove her away, just like when back then Olivia asked Samantha about Dad’s actions she was also called a liar and slapped.
A distraught Sylvia isolates herself at home, comforted by Saul; Olivia tries to see her but is turned away by Anna who wants to know why her aunt never confirmed Mom’s traumas, to which Olivia says she was just a child, didn’t really know for sure what was going on, didn't know what to do. Eventually, with Saul’s help Sylvia goes back to work, but one night after Saul gets up to use the bathroom he can’t remember which bedroom is Sylvia’s, which is Anna’s, so he sits in the hall for the rest of the night to avoid any misunderstandings. ⇒Next day when he’s by himself he falls from Sylvia’s balcony, is taken to the hospital where Sylvia’s prevented by Isaac from seeing him. When Saul’s back at Isaac’s home Sylvia tries to contact him, but he doesn’t reply to her phone messages. Anna goes to visit, finds he has a full-time nurse, Isaac took away his phone so Saul knew nothing of Sylvia’s attempts. Anna convinces Saul to sneak out with her so she can take him back to Sylvia.⇐
So What? In early 2024 I devoted most of this blog to 2023 releases just coming to streaming; after the Oscar awards, though, I wanted to focus only on 2024 releases (except for re-watching Funny Girl [William Wyler, 1968] so I could officially give it 5 stars), but in a couple of cases staying true to my self-imposed limitation called for a useful rationalization. While Memory had played at the September 8, 2023 Venice Film Festival that was no problem as I never muddy up my release-considerations because something has screened at any domestic (U.S.-Canada) or overseas festivals because all I care about is whatever I’m exploring is currently available to a potentially-large audience either in theaters or on streaming platforms, but the wrinkle with Memory is it opened in LA and NYC on December 22, 2023, didn’t go wider than that until January 2024 so that’s when the rationalization comes in as I'd now consider this as a 2024 film, easily ready for the blog's reviewing.
Rationalization or not, I was interested in this story because of Sarsgaard, who plays smarmy attorney Tommy Motto in the Apple TV+ streaming series, Presumed Innocent, trying to prove his former colleague, Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal) killed another colleague, Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsva), with whom Rusty was having an affair. (The final episode aired tonight—I won’t give anything away*—so my next [non-blog] task is to watch the 1990 movie [Alan J. Pakula], like the TV series based on a 1987 novel by Scott Turow, where Harrison Ford is Sabich, Joe Grifasi is Motto, Greta Scacchi is Polhemus, and Sabich’s wife, Barbara [played marvelously in the TV series by Ruth Negga], is Bonnie Bedelia). While I can’t say anything yet about this movie (Rotten Tomatoes gave it 86% positive reviews, Metacritic’s average score was 72%; highly successful at the box-office as well, $221.3 million worldwide [lots back then])—although I likely saw it but at present no memory comes back to me—but I do highly recommend the current Apple TV+ series, as the plot takes unanticipated turns, tension stays consistently high, acting is marvelous throughout, including by Sarsgaard, as he is too in Memory, to now take us back to what I’m supposed to be writing about.
*But, if you’re like one of my cats (curiosity = trouble), go here (Spoilers!) to learn what's happened.
In fact, when this film was shown last fall in Venice he won their Volpi Cut for Best Actor, hence the photo of him above the previous paragraph (I can’t find any info on who the other nominees were) and I hope some likewise consideration was given to Chastain (but even if it was, the Volpi Cup for Best Actress went to Cailee Spaeny for Priscilla [Sofia Coppola, 2023; review in our January 4, 2024 posting]), a Best Actress Oscar winner for The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Michael Showalter, 2021; review in our January 13, 2022 posting) who provided the other reason—along with Sarsgaard—why I was interested in seeing Memory, because she’s so powerful in every role she’s taken on, a streak that continues with her performance here. These two main characters are fascinatingly-fractured as well in that Sylvia’s been so damaged by her past assaults she’s too eager to assume Saul was one of her rapists when that was never the case just as he’s so lost in his mental fog that when they go to a diner he apparently regularly frequents he has no idea what the “special” he always orders is nor does he recall the waitress who regularly brings it to him, yet he knows what he feels for Sylvia even though I’m sure he’d have a hard time describing it to anyone. However, like with Fancy Dance (Erica Trembay) which I reviewed last week, the hopeful feelings at the end of what’s on screen in this film are just a pause in an ongoing flow of events which haven’t found true resolution yet, as much more is likely to come in the form of complications especially from Isaac or Samantha, maybe even Robert or Sara, but that’s for us to speculate, without any solid direction from the presented events to guide our assumptions into an unknown future for these folks. Sometimes that’s what makes a film so effective: we’ve given a lot, even as more (ambiguous in details) is vaguely implied.
Bottom Line Final Comments: As noted above, Memory did have a theatrical run, although it hardly made a dent at the box-office, taking in only about $381 thousand domestically, $1.7 million worldwide, so now your opportunity to see this fine drama rests with cable TV and streaming, where you might luck onto a screening on Showtime (as I did) with that option also apparently in some form by itself or in conjunction with Paramount+ where you can find it free for 7 days, same with fubo, or you can rent it for $5.99 from Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV+ (the JustWatch site is now more detailed than it used to be, but, at least for me, a bit confusing in what it cites for watching availability). The CCAL is supportive of you doing some exploration to find this film, though, with RT positive reviews at 86%, MC average score at 71%. I think overall you’d be satisfied if you seek it out, although there is a troubling aspect to Sylvia’s mistaken memory of Saul raping her, which may inadvertently (certainly she was traumatized by whomever assaulted her then) feed into the stance of those—like Samantha—who deny the validity of people, mostly women, who have memories of sexual attacks even though the accused-perpetrators and their supporters claim nothing ever happened. I don’t think such questioning of victims’ accounts are an intended aspect of this narrative, although if Olivia’s memory is correct then Sylvia was initially wrong about Saul despite her self-conviction that she was right. We might also wonder just how effective a lover Saul will be for Sylvia given his almost-closed memory of past events, his unclear ability to fully understand what’s going on in his current life, so we have flawed but sincere characters here who may be a positive infusion for each other or may just be a passing respite in ongoing seas of turmoil.
I’ll leave any further interpretations of this film to you as I move on to closure with my standard device of a Musical Metaphor, which I suppose could be Procol Harum’s "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (a 1967 hit, found on the U.S. album of the band’s name [but not on the U.K. version of the same album]), which is used frequently in the film, although I can’t say exactly how it relates to Memory’s story (nor can anyone seem to definitively explain what the song is about), so I’ll go another direction with “The Way We Were” (written by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman, Marvin Hamlisch, on the soundtrack album of The Way We Were movie [Sydney Pollack, 1973]) at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K2_Kl36IEA, with Barbra Streisand singing, accompanied by clips of her and Robert Redford from the movie, or if you’d just prefer Barbra here she is at the 2013 Oscar ceremony in tribute to the late Hamlisch (died 2012), with the tune winning the 1974 Oscar for Best Original Song. Yes, this Metaphor choice is about a romance that couldn’t endure the sociopolitical differences of the lovers, but for me it can also be about Saul’s lost memories of the way he was (and mostly is) while I project it referring as well to a future time for Sylvia when Saul will likely forget who she is as well. An ultimately sad song tacked on by me to a film that looks for hope wherever it can be found, yet still appropriate to the unsettled lives of these 2 damaged protagonists.
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
Here are 4 options for your thoughtful consideration: (1) IMDb's 5 Things to Watch this week; (2) Netflix tops 277 million subscribers: (3) IMDb's most anticipated sequels, prequels, spin-offs; (4) Inside Out 2 now highest-grossing movie in history, $1.46 billion worldwide, still growing.
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