52 Films by Women Vol 6. 7. REMINISCENCE (Director: Lisa Joy)
Reminiscence, the debut feature from writer-director Lisa
Joy, the co-creator (with Jonathan Nolan) of the TV reboot of Westworld, is the latest big-budget film to flounder at the US box office in the
wake of Covid-19. Warner Bros, its distributor, simultaneously released it in
theatres and on HBO Max, its premier streaming service. Science-fantasy fans
would undoubtedly have caught it through streaming, but few turned up to see it
on the big screen. Quite apart from the high-concept – a submersion tank that
enables you to feel your memories and experience them again and again – the
main draw is the reteaming of The
Greatest Showman co-stars Hugh
Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson. It turns out that Jackman is only a star when he
has adamantine claws sticking out of his knuckles (as Logan aka The Wolverine)
or singing and dancing as Phineas Taylor Barnum. As for Ferguson, she does her
best Jessica Rabbit impression as a singer with a shady past but hasn’t yet
found the role to transport her to A-list status.
Joy’s $65 million
budget covers digital effects but doesn’t bring them quite to life. Her biggest
imagining is the city of Miami several feet underwater following the effects of
global warming. The days are too hot to endure. People only make a living at
night. Having established this, Joy doesn’t use the idea to contribute to the
plot. Instead, the concept is a pretext for an old-fashioned film noir, with
Jackman (as ex-soldier Nick Bannister) playing a variation of a 1930s gumshoe,
with a mouth for a cynical voiceover and an eye for a woman – Mae (Ferguson) –
who pays good money to find her house keys, using Bannister’s memory-retriever.
The film is so
old-fashioned that Nick has to lull his customers to sleep with his soothing
tones like a stage hypnotist: ‘you’re going down a road you’ve travelled
before’. He guides them to alight on just the thing they want to recall, for
example, playing with their dog. Given the sensory nature of the experience,
you’d think Nick would be pestered by a bunch of middle-aged men wanting to
relive the loss of their virginity, but this is a PG-13 rated movie and besides
Joy doesn’t exploit women. The process costs a fair coin – there are no dollar
bills, it seems (they are likely to get lost in the water) – but Nick has a
favourite customer whom he lets use the machine ‘on the house’, a veteran who
had lost his legs in the war. Joy is clearly aiming for audiences of both Republican
and Democrat persuasion. The Republicans will appreciate the reverence towards
the armed forces; Democrats the concern about rising water levels.
The 1995 Kevin
Costner picture, Waterworld did a much better job of depicting a post-climate
catastrophe environment, with its characters’ desperate search for dry land. It
also cost almost three times as much as Reminiscence
(perhaps four times as much if adjusted for inflation) but everything about the
film exploited its sea-bound setting. In the opening of Reminiscence, the camera glides between buildings towards
a street that is seemingly protected from the water on which we first see Nick.
There is some water on the sidewalk. Nick reaches down and picks up a playing
card – the Queen of Hearts – handing it to an old guy in his chair. ‘You lost
your queen,’ Nick tells him. The old guy barely registers his gratitude. ‘Care
to find her again?’ he asks, indicating three cards on a table. Nick declines
and heads into his office, a building with a large room in which stands his
immersion tank. Customers are supposed to strip naked to use it, but this being
a PG-13 rated film, black underwear is worn by the film’s stars.
Nick has a partner,
Emily ‘Watts’ Sanders (Thandiwe Newton), the sort of steadfast woman who loves
her boss only he doesn’t see her that way. You’ve seen that character a dozen
times over, most recently in the television reboot of Perry Mason. Joy doesn’t subvert the stereotype exactly
– how about the sidekick guy who isn’t seen by the woman he loves – but she
does give Newton a kick-ass action scene which she performs with aplomb.
Both Nick and Watts are
wounded souls – Watts is estranged from her daughter. Nick falls for Mae when
he sees her a second time, returning an earring that she left behind. When
Nick’s customers use the immersion tank, their memories are projected as a
hologram so that Nick and Watts can watch. As we watch them, we can hear what
happened in the past. However, I wasn’t sure that Nick and Watts could. The
memories are also out-of-body experiences, so that the subject (as well as Nick
and Watts) can see themselves as well as what they see. I found this hard to
fathom, preferring the way that this was handled in Douglas Trumbell’s 1983
film Brainstorm, which gives us point of view shots. Kathryn
Bigalow’s 1995 film, Strange
Days, adopts a similar
point-of-view approach. The problem with using point of view shots for scenes in
which the characters participate is that you turn them into off-camera
voiceovers. The audience has come to watch movie stars, damn it! Joy’s main
influence is the pre-cog scenes from Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film, Minority Report, another futuristic noir drama, in which
crimes are witnessed before they happen, and future criminals are arrested. The
pre-cogs had their heads wired up and lay in water tanks, just like Nick’s
customers. Minority Report is a lot more thrilling than Reminiscence but almost as corny.
Sucked in by Mae’s
performance (at the Coconut Club) of ‘Where or When’, Nick escorts her home and
listens to her getting real, slowly approaching him before they kiss. As they
make love, the water purifier overruns. That’s one way of doing it. In true film
noir style, Nick and Mae spend more time together. They climb a tower that
overlooks the city. ‘Tell me a story with a happy ending,’ Mae asks as he
embraces her, the couple staring at the watery horizon. ‘There are no happy
endings,’ Nick replies glumly. ‘Then tell me a story with an unhappy ending but
end it in the middle.’ Nick starts to tell her the story of Orpheus and
Eurydice, which is also related in Celine Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Nick gets to the part where Eurydice dies,
and Orpheus goes to the Underworld to retrieve her. However, he stops at the
point where Orpheus can’t bear not to look at her, turns around and sends her
back to the Underworld. Sciamma examined the cause of that moment, asking whether
Eurydice called to him, willing the moment of her return to death.
At any rate, Mae
disappears. Nick becomes distraught. He keeps getting thrown out of the Coconut
Club by the doorman. How many times could he tell him ‘Mae ain’t here’? Nick
had almost given up – and had taken plenty of dips in his immersion tank
himself – until he finds himself assisting the police. A hoodlum whose memories
Nick explores met Mae five years ago – she is in the background. Nick switches
his memory prompts to getting the guy to recall all the times that he saw Mae,
who was in an abusive relationship until the mobster Saint Joe (Daniel Wu) took
an interest in her. Mae, it turns out, subsequently stole Saint Joe’s stock of
the highly addictive bacca – Mae initially resisted tasting the product but
eventually obliged – and then attempted a new life. Only a corrupt cop in Saint
Joe’s payroll, Cyrus Boothe (Cliff Curtis) tracked her down. By this time, Mae
had gotten rid of the bacca. Cyrus had another use for her. Nick discovers that
he had been played.
There isn’t a single
plot twist that hasn’t featured in another movie. However, in Nick, Joy gives
us a protagonist who isn’t the typical action hero who can overcome the odds. In
a trip to New Orleans, he has to be rescued after having his head dunked in a
tank full of face-chewing eels by the afore-mentioned kick-ass Watts. He
similarly chases Cyrus over a hotel rooftop and almost has his manhood
compromised by a ‘No Vacancy’ sign. The
plot involves a corrupt real estate baron Walter Sylvan (Brett Cullen), his
living-in-the-past wife, Tamara (Marina De Tavira), who auditions men to play
her husband, and their man-child, baby-faced son Sebastian (Mojean Aria), as
well as a mistress and Sebastian’s young half-brother. There is also a point
when Nick fires Watts.
In the film’s best
moments, we are yanked out of the story when Nick ends an immersion session. We
think the story is progressing in a linear way but Joy jolts us forward. The
key scene, when Nick enters a memory and replaces the subject, Cyrus, almost
achieves the poignancy that Joy was striving for. Mae is talking to Cyrus but
says things that only make sense to Nick, who takes his place.
Fundamentally, Reminiscence doesn’t convince us that we have watched
something new. It does prepare us for an unhappy, bitter-sweet ending in which
the protagonist commits himself to his own form of punishment. I wasn’t
actually convinced that Nick had committed a crime sufficiently serious to
merit his fate. However, this is one of Joy’s tweaking of the genre. Meanwhile,
the water that covers the roads in Miami doesn’t intrude on the characters. You
can watch the film and wonder if we should really be concerned by the climate
emergency. The answer is, of course we should.
Reviewed at
Cineworld, Leicester Square (Screen One), Central London, Tuesday 24 August
2021, 17:40 screening
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