Nostalgia is a lie, but it’s true that they don’t make studio movies quite like they used to. It’s a common lament that non-IP influenced, original screenplays, and movies with smart-thinking, sexy lead adults aren’t as supported by the major studios as they once were. Enter “Reminiscence,” with its unabashed old soul and classic appetite for what makes a great Hollywood tale. It’s all about gorgeous movie stars intertwined, mysteries that throw characters into emotional labyrinths, and rich, practical production design that makes a Hollywood set a not-too-fantastical reflection of the real world. The film is a gem, really, with noir-inspired cynicism that’s almost too pure for the era of “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” but it’s nonetheless packed with intellectual and emotional thrills from debut writer/director Lisa Joy.
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The significance of being a crafty pastiche about nostalgia’s fleeting high does not escape the incredibly sharp Joy, who embraces various noir and classic movie tropes with the expansive thinking of sci-fi. Rebecca Ferguson plays the femme fatale here, in a story that involves her character Mae getting close to a man who works in the business of memories, and who helps people briefly feel the contents of a memory, instead of just recalling it. Mae appears at his business one night, looking for help in finding her keys. His machine, called the Reminiscence, allows a worker to sift through these memories as if they’re watching a movie unfold in third-person. But while flipping through Mae’s previous thoughts, he catches a glimpse of her job as a lounge singer. She’s crooning the wistful ballad “Where or When,” which we learn has a deep place in his heart. He is in love. The two embark on a sunkissed Hollywood-grade romance in defiance of the crumbling world around them.
Suddenly, the lady vanishes. Finding out just where to becomes a months-long, unhealthy addiction for Hugh Jackman’s Nick, starting with no sign from the bar she used to work at. In his daytime gig of helping the district attorney’s office, he finds a lead by accessing the memories of a drug dealer associate, who works for a New Orleans head honcho named St. Joe. Watching this memory unfold on a projector screen, like a black-and-white newsreel of Nick’s nightmares, he learns about the true past of a woman he had cared for so deeply. The question of Mae becomes even more fascinatingly complicated and painful. Even more gutting than the loss is the idea that his perspective of Mae could have been another lie from nostalgia’s limited gaze.
Ferguson’s recent work in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise and “Doctor Sleep” has been ramping her up for a role like this, and she doesn’t miss the opportunity to take us right to the edge of uncertainty, embodying someone of unknown goals and unmistakable power, whether she’s in a room of dangerous criminals or behind a microphone (Ferguson does her own singing). She is the movie’s mystery box, and your inclinations about her stew throughout the movie with each carefully doled jump Joy makes back to the past.
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Jackman, too, seems built for a role like this, the way he can carry a muted anguish on his hulking shoulders with the emotional accessibility of an everyman, and guide us every step of the way through an obsession that becomes our own. He’s equally believable here when getting his ass-kicked by henchmen for snooping in a drug den or quickly dispatching someone in a police station, in a moment for Joy to establish his military experience during “the border wars,” which comes in handy for a few convenient plot developments throughout. But the power in Jackman’s performance is more about his voice-acting, and how Joy uses his timbre hypnotically from the very beginning: the warmth and calm of its gentle bassy tone. We become just like Nick’s customers in the reminiscence machine, easing into his commands, getting lost in his ideas.
“Reminiscence” is a whole collection of different experiences with nostalgia, with every character coated in its ideas about how a person holds onto the past. Thandiwe Newton is excellent as Nick’s business partner, a high-functioning alcoholic who has her own history that she has been looking away from. Later into the story, Joy makes great use of the brawn and intensity that comes from Cliff Curtis, who plays a dirty cop deeply enmeshed in the script’s brewing corruption and drug dealing business.
Brandishing the world-building skills she honed as a writer, producer, and director on HBO’s “Westworld,” Joy does an incredible job of painting a decayed present here, an unforgiving landscape that explains why people would cling to the past. This version of Miami has accepted its fate of being flooded, and the feeling of Nick constantly getting their shoes and pants soaked, just to get across the street, is a visceral nod to the constant rainfall of dystopic Los Angeles in “Blade Runner.” Or, it’s a reverse “Chinatown,” in which it’s no longer the terror of a drought destroying its people, but of too much water. Joy uses global warming as a fact of the future, and its grandeur becomes bittersweet—it’s amazing to see Warner Bros. invest in this detail with massive practical sets, but painful in that it’s so honest to the current state of the environment. Noir is a viscerally cynical game, and it’s at times exhilarating to see how much Joy and wide-scale production is able to honor that.
Water takes on many different significances in the script, whether it’s in the Reminiscence machine, or the class divide it creates in Miami, and it becomes one of many elements, like that of having an addiction to help avoid the present, that shares space in Joy’s heady script. The film is so interconnected with its characters and its different themes, that in a few moments it seems to be overwhelmed, just like Jackman’s hard-boiled anecdotes about nostalgia can be as much of an overly serious mouthful as the movie’s title. In terms of story, the overall conspiracy at hand doesn’t work as well as it wants to, relying on supporting characters who are beyond the script’s emotional grasp, but it still leads to long-lasting imagery about clocks, time, and the patterns anyone can be trapped in. And while the emotional finale for Nick and Mae’s journey is presented with gutting, poetic visuals only possible from Joy’s inventive sci-fi rules, its tone takes too sharp a turn in order to create a few more beats, which threaten to undermine what should hit hardest.
In building this mystery, and in proving herself as a major entertainer, Joy always has something up her sleeve, including her savvy ways to suddenly spike the plot with a slickly edited fight scene that builds the mystery instead of just taking a break from it. It’s a real treat when Jackman and another character square off in a bravura fight sequence later into the film. The life-or-death scuffle keeps going and going, up and down dilapidated buildings and into flooded classrooms, throwing in an homage to “Oldboy”’s oft-quoted hammer sequence, and climaxes with a gorgeous slow-motion shot involving a grand piano sinking into a submerged concert hall. The water levels may rise, the drug of nostalgia will continue to rule our brains. So long as directors like Lisa Joy can orchestrate the grandiose images that fill “Reminiscence,” we’ll at least have some stunning Hollywood storytelling to look forward to. [B+]
“Reminiscence” arrives in theaters and on HBO Max on August 20.