by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Josh Charles
Intro:
…. a sometimes-frustrating, sometimes-tender depiction of the ways that the human brain can work against itself.
The mind is a remarkable piece of hardware, but it comes with the usual drawbacks. It degrades over time, no guarantees that it will maintain functionality, it can succumb to internal and external damage, and the specs for how it prioritises data are all off.
Remembering good things that have happened shouldn’t be nearly this difficult, while remembering bad things shouldn’t be nearly this easy. Finding one’s keys should be simpler than recalling the colour of your Year 3 teacher’s hair. And coming to terms with what can, and often does, happen to it shouldn’t be this bloody depressing.
Memory, from Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco, has been packaged as a somewhat high-concept take on a romantic drama. A woman who never forgets (social worker and recovering alcoholic Sylvia, played by Jessica Chastain) meets a man who can’t remember (Saul, played by Peter Sarsgaard, who has early-onset dementia). However, that notion implies that the film’s impact is a lot more immediate than it ultimately is. Through its washed-out colours, lingering shots of characters, and general willingness to take things slow, it can often feel like an easy lay-up for trite quips about lack of memorability.
But let’s not take the easy way out with this one, because this film deserves more respect than that. As wayward as its progression can be, ultimately focusing more on Sylvia’s family life than strictly being about her growing relationship with Saul, when it hits, it hits hard.
One of its early developments is Sylvia suspecting that Saul was involved with her sexual assault in high school, and it stays relatively close to that level of full-on discomfort from then on. The way that Franco’s script plays with the contrasting relationships with memory, and how what’s buried still affects what’s on the surface, adds suitable psychological textures to the story, as does Yves Cape’s cinematography with its regular experimentation with focus.
The film ends up being at its most engaging when it digs deep into how Sylvia and Saul’s connection to their memories are reacted to by others, which reaches aggravating but cathartic moments of reality. Sylvia’s alcoholism gives way to teeth-grinding gaslighting, while Saul ends up being on the receiving end of some particularly condescending attitudes concerning disability and mental acuity. Seeing his brother Isaac’s (Josh Charles) repeated disregard of his own sentience because of his faulty memory speaks to the reality of the gap between saying you’re an advocate and actually being one.
Memory is a sometimes-frustrating, sometimes-tender depiction of the ways that the human brain can work against itself. There’s definite moments of restlessness in watching it, as it’s A Ghost Story-esque drawing of attention to the passage of time often feels just as much like a failed experiment, but between its knowledgeable and empathetic understanding of how those with ‘invisible disorders’ are treated, and Chastain and Sarsgaard being absolutely adorable as an on-screen couple (right down to one of the most naturalistic intimacy scenes in recent years), the material here manages to keep above the surrounding beige. At the risk of being corny, it fits with its title in how a lot of it blurs together because it’s so mundane, whereas the stuff that sticks out causes intense emotional reactions.
