Reminiscence (2021, Dir. Lisa Joy):
There’s something tragic about the way we try to hold on to the ones we love through memory, but it’s never good enough. So, I started thinking about what would happen if there was a machine that could change that and bring us back to the moments we’re longing to be in.
Lisa Joy
Read the synopsis for Reminiscence, and you might think this film was authored by Christopher and/or Jonathan Nolan. Once upon a time, before they turned to blockbusters and big-budget TV shows, the Nolan brothers collaborated on melancholic thrillers like Memento and The Prestige—films that hinged on mind-bending twists, but maintained recognizably human dimensions. Reminiscence bears all the earmarks of those movies: an obsessed protagonist, a preoccupation with memories and revenge, a noir vibe. So maybe it’s a surprise (but not a huge one) that Reminiscence is written and directed by Lisa Joy, who happens to be Jonathan Nolan’s wife, as well as a co-creator and producer on his Westworld TV series. And perhaps a bit of a relief: with both Nolan brothers losing the plot recently (Christopher’s disconnected, over-cerebral Tenet, Jonathan’s Westworld looping round and round in pointless circles in seasons 2 and 3), maybe it was high time someone else bring a fresh approach to the territory the Nolans have carved out for themselves.
Based on a script that Joy formulated nearly a decade ago, Reminiscence reads like a more down-to-earth variation on a Nolan thriller. We’re in a half-sunken Miami of the near future, where the have-nots are forced to reside in the portion of the city that’s flooded and the haves (aka “land barons”) hoard all the dry land for themselves. Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) is your prototypical hard-boiled lead, updated for the tech age: For a price, he helps clients wallow in their most powerful memories using a machine that resembles a sensory deprivation tank hooked up to a holodeck. Half-psychologist, half-showman, he ushers his customers into a hypnotic state (“You’re going on a journey. A journey through memory. Your destination? A place and time you’ve been before…”) and pilots them through the mists of their pasts, while his hard-drinking buddy Watts (Thandiwe Newton) supplies snark and admin support. When sultry nightclub singer Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) rolls in on a rainy night, asking Nick to dig into her memories so she can find a lost set of keys, it smells of a set-up, but like any noir patsy, Nick is all too happy to play along. (Mae’s name may recall Mae West, but the redhead has the curves and come-hither attitude of Jessica Rabbit.) Before long Nick and Mae are having a torrid affair, and when she goes missing his investigation draws him into a vortex of obsession where he encounters numerous malefactors, including a drug kingpin (Daniel Wu) who had his hooks into Mae, a devious bent cop (Cliff Curtis) and a dying land baron (Brett Cullen) who might have his own connection to another memory client. Romance, loss, sci-fi trickery, mystery—it sounds like a recipe for fun.
The past can haunt a man. That’s what they say. That the past is just a series of moments. Each one perfect. Complete. A bead on the necklace of time. The past doesn’t haunt us. Wouldn’t even recognize us. If there are ghosts to be found, it’s us who haunt the past.
Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman)
Reminiscence telegraphs its twists well in advance: when Nick’s expository voice-over warns us about the danger of getting too wrapped up in one’s past, is there any doubt that he’s in for a rude awakening (or dream state, as the case may be)? Tasked with communicating clunky homilies about the nature of memories, Jackman does the best he can with lines like “Memory is the boat that sails against time’s current, and I’m the oarsman.” At least the setting is more grounded than standard Nolan extravaganzas: apart from a few soaring shots of dystopian Miami cityscape, the surroundings are tactile, and Joy doesn’t feel compelled to explain every nook and cranny of her universe. Hushed references to a “border war” (in which both Nick and Watts participated) and a drug known as “baca” are enough to prick our interest without bashing us over the head, while the action sequences are simplicity itself: a shootout in a bar, an underwater wrestling match in a submerged theater.
A few moments stand out, such as when Mae serenades Nick with the old ditty “Where or When”; the lyrics are a bit on-the-nose in underscoring the film’s memory-centric focus, but the scene nevertheless casts a spell. In a later disquieting episode, Nick confronts a former client who has gone insane and insists on reliving the same moment over and over on a fabricated set, with a rolling cast of actors playing the part of her now-deceased husband. Joy’s characters may be stereotypes—it’s no shock that Newton’s badass Watts turns out to have a yen for her partner Nick—but at least she seems interested in them as humans.
Like many a Nolan film, Reminiscence‘s central conceit doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. We’re supposed to believe that memories can be rendered in crystal-clear 3D fidelity (including details that the rememberer couldn’t possibly notice), but as anyone who’s dealt with memory knows, they can often be hazy at best, or even outright misleading. Instead of integrating these uncertainties into the plot, Joy plows forward with standard genre elements: betrayals and double-crosses, a femme fatale who might actually be a wounded heroine, entitled millionaires doing very bad things, innocent people meeting icky ends. (Déjà vu all over again, you might say.) Most of the plot turns are expected, none of them are surprising, and that generic feel ultimately undermines Reminiscence. Joy is a straightforward director, her framing and pacing clean, well-coiffed, almost clinical—a poor match for a story that could have used more sweat and desperation. Speaking of sweat, the characters comment often on the sweltering Miami weather, yet none of them perspire that much, and the same goes for the performances. Jackman and Ferguson are photogenic, of course, but their chemistry fizzles rather than sizzles. You can buy their relationship as a fun fling, but not a life-changing bond that leaves Jackman bereft and frantic when Ferguson disappears—a major shortcoming for a movie that’s supposed to draw its emotional impact from their romance. Wu’s slimy kingpin is the closest Reminiscence comes to attaining the danger and sleaze of a classic noir mystery: dropping Mandarin Chinese indiscriminately into his speech, he revels in his decadence. Too bad he’s only around for five minutes, his appearance punctuated by a gun battle that gestures towards the spatial ingenuity and acrobatics of a vintage John Woo set-piece, minus any of the intensity.
For a movie that’s all about the power of memory, Reminiscence is pretty forgettable, as it putters from one plot point to the next. Jackman strains for a half-decent approximation of a man wracked with longing and confusion; meanwhile, Newton quite sensibly tires of his woe-is-me routine, and pulls a disappearing act of her own in the third act, as if saying to us, This isn’t going well, I’m outta here. (We in the audience have no such luck.) Reminiscence wants to believe that it’s leading us to a rousing climax in which Nick arrives at a revelation about Mae that seals his own fate, and there’s a certain neatness in the story’s resolution, with a parting memory of Mae serving as ironic closure. But while Joy is too smart to give us an unqualified happy ending, the emotional impact of Reminiscence’s conclusion is equivalent to the memories Nicks draws out of his clients: bloodless, uninvolving, straining for resonance that isn’t there. If the film proves anything, it’s that while it might not be difficult to replicate the Nolan brothers’ weaknesses, it’s quite another thing to provide a narrative or filmmaking jolt that outdoes them at their best. ■
