A noir-sci-fi mix both entertaining and confounding, just the right mashup for a drama whose centerpiece is the mind.
Reminiscence
Reminiscence is writer/director Lisa Joy’s mashup of the Nolan-like memory motif and the noir genre with water imagery from baptism to death from any film you can remember. (She’s Christopher Nolan’s sister-in-law). Like Nolan, Joy has an interest in the many worlds occupied by the mind and herself does an effective job of melding noir and sci-fi. In other words, it tries to do a bit too much yet is saved by its good intentions and glam stars like Hugh Jackman as Nick and Rebecca Ferguson as Mae.
He’s an investigator of the mind in a dystopian Miami and New Orleans, both flooded from global warming, I suppose, both Blade-Runner dark and decaying. She comes into his memory-catching lab as if she were walking into Bogie’s Maltese Falcon office—a red-headed femme fatale, channeling Rita Hayworth’s Gilda for starters.
He spends the rest of the film looking for her after she bolts; he uses his business—capturing the past through memory—to try to get her back. Although the dream-like drowning like ceremony does indeed connect him and his clients to life scenes, nothing much good eventuates. Immersion in one’s memories, experiencing them, seems dicey at best.
It’s as if the film were saying that any reach back to the past to mitigate the pain of the present is a fool’s journey. Reminiscence also highlights the imperfection of memories; their incompleteness is divorced from the reality of the present and its built-in reality safeguards.
Besides the two leads, Reminiscence is bolstered by fine supporting actors such as Thandie Newton, playing Nick’s associate, Watts, who is a boozer and a veteran with just the right cool, care, and martial arts expertise to make me think Newton could carry her own super hero film.
If the film could be edited down to a manageable clarity by reducing its noir allusions, and evidencing more profound outcomes, Joy might not have to remember Inception.
Reminiscence
Director: Lisa Joy
Screenplay: Joy
Cast: Hugh Jackman (Logan), Rebecca Ferguson (Mission Impossible)
Run Time: 1h 56 min
Rating: PG-13
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com
