Memory, 2023.
Directed by Michel Franco.
Starring Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Brooke Timber, Merritt Wever, Josh Charles, Jackson Dorfmann, Elsie Fisher, and Jessica Harper.
SYNOPSIS:
Sylvia is a social worker who leads a simple and structured life. This is blown open when Saul follows her home from their high school reunion. Their surprise encounter will profoundly impact both of them as they open the door to the past.
Michel Franco’s Memory has the odds stacked in its favour when it comes to delivering the kind of emotional story that thrives on the festival and awards circuits. There’s the one-two combination of not only Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, but the double-whammy of alcoholism and dementia at the cruel heart of this drama. It’s quite the disappointment then that while the actors expectedly deliver impactful performances, what unfolds is a tediously dull exercise in stilted melodrama.
Memory doesn’t begin that way. The film is intentionally stripped back and disconcerting, accentuating the intimate noise that plagues the world of Chastain’s spectral figure. The complete lack of any score, with everyday noises heightened in a way that gives you an immediate insight into the way the outside world is growing increasingly intolerable to Sylvia. It’s uncomfortable, annoying even, but that’s the point. Coupled that with Chastain’s broken performance, and straight away your empathy is tethered to her pain and suffering.
Things change when she is followed home from her high school reunion by Sarsgaard’s Saul. It’s a sequence that would make Halloween‘s Michael Myers tell him to “take it easy, bro”, but not everything is as it seems because this terrifying situation doesn’t turn out to be an echo from Sylvia’s past, one deeply rooted in trauma, but an alignment with another broken life.
Saul suffers from dementia, and while it’s never clear why he decides to pursue Sylvia home, not knowing the answers to such questions simply offers a glimpse into his dissipating world.
From there these two souls, one wanting to forget their past, the other longing to hold onto it, form an alliance that evolves into an intimate connection. It’s a relationship that’s played with gentle realism by Chastain and Sarsgaard. Their respective conditions never manifest in the way you might expect from a movie dealing with such themes. There is no grandstanding or show-reel montage moments here. They are ordinary folks burdened by lives forced upon them, and the two actors execute their performances with a quiet, tragic brilliance.
It’s when the focus shifts from them that the patience afforded to the glacial pace of Memory begins to grate. The family mechanics, especially where Sylvia is concerned, play out like something from a three-times-a-week soap opera. One showdown scene feels so out-of-place with the rest of the movie, everyone taking their turn in the spotlight as secrets start spilling out, that it completely undermines the drama of the exchanges.
Despite well-intentioned themes on the way society dehumanises those afflicted with debilitating illnesses, and Chastain and Sarsgaard convincing with their tender performances, Memory can’t escape from the fact it’s a painfully boring affair.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
