Reminiscence: Hugh Jackman-Led Detective Yarn Sinks In Memory Hole
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
The time is after the War, and it’s dark and wet and the big guy in the raincoat with a permanent three-day stubble is a gloomy hombre with a code of honour.
You think this might be the past but it’s the future, where because of climate change it’s too hot to go out during the day, so everything takes place at night. The place is Miami, but half-submerged from the rising oceans, with high-rises poking out of the water, as commuters travel in boat taxis and the poor slosh through the streets.
Our hero is named Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) and he runs a kind of detective agency that looks more like a disreputable tanning salon in an abandoned warehouse. Customers strip off and lie down in a flotation tank, wearing an VR headset. He gives them an injection into their necks and helps them relive their memories.
Sometimes Nick does work for the district attorney, mining witness memories. Sometimes the individual clients long to be once again in the arms of a dead partner, or to visit those happier times, before the war and the rise of the oceans.
In the case that gets Reminiscence rolling, it’s a slinky nightclub chanteuse in a red dress named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) who lost her keys that morning. Nick’s business partner and former military buddy, Watts (Thandiwe Newton) — a hard-drinking, sharp-shooting lovelorn sidekick — doesn’t like the way Nick is so fascinated by Mae.
As her memories kicks in, Mae’s recent past appears in 3D in a small circular stage which both Nick and Watts can see. Nick watches Mae leave the keys in her dressing room before beginning her nightclub gig. As he watches her sing the Rogers and Hart classic, “Where Or When,” he’s an instant goner.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Conceptually, Reminiscence has promise. It marries the wry melancholy of classic detective fiction to a close-to-the-bone dystopian near-future involving climate change, civil war, including border conflicts and internment camps. Writer/director Lisa Joy co-created the TV series, Westworld, another drama about using technology to tap into subjective experiences. Her husband, Jonathan Nolan wrote the screenplay for his brother, Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough memory-hole drama, Memento.
What is missing is the wit, poetry, sleaze and outsized characters that makes noir more than a synonym for “depressing.” Too often, Nick’s voice-over pronouncements feel like so many drafts toward trying to say something profound: “Memories have a voracious appetite. If you’re not careful, they’ll consume you.” Or “Memory is the boat that sails against its current.” (See the last paragraph of The Great Gatsby). Or “Memories are like perfume, better in small doses.”
That rule also applies to generalizations about memory but let me try one: In Reminiscence, Memory Lane isn’t that rat-filled back alley that lures you into its tangled shadows. It’s more like an IKEA loading dock, with a heap of leftover bits from Vertigo, Gilda, along with Blade Runner and the Nolan family genre (Memento, Inception, Westworld), along with a unreadable instruction sheet that’s been left out in the rain.
Let’s deal with the big pieces first. There’s a Trumpian slumlord named Walter Sylvan (Brett Cullen), with a foreign wife and a creepy heir and an illegitimate kid from another woman. There’s part of the film in New Orleans, and a Chinese-American drug dealer named Saint Jo (Daniel Wu) who spent time in an internment camp. In his employ is a crooked cop, Cyruss (Cliff Curtis) who talks like a gangster from a Warner Bros movie of the 1930s.
At the heart of it, there’s no persuasive emotional hook here; nothing about Jackman’s Nick that suggests he’s particularly tortured or obsessive; nothing about Ferguson’s Mae, in her pretty red dress and her unremarkable singing voice, that should inspire him to chase her through the present and past.
Easily the best scene takes place when Nick is getting his head held underwater in a tank full of eels when Watt bursts in to rescue him and shoots up the joint with her gunshots are synched to the clank-clank cowbell sound in Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” It’s not a necessary scene, but an entertaining one.
Otherwise, Reminiscence doesn’t leave us much to remember it by, apart from those mournful CGI vistas of water-logged Miami.
Reminiscence. Directed and written by Lisa Joy. Starring Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Fergusson, Thandiwe Newton, Cliff Curtis and Daniel Wu. Now showing in theatres.