A film this talky is almost inevitably going to have a line or two of dialogue that handily explicates its themes. And sure enough, somewhere in the first act of Michael Almereyda‘s thoughtful, verbose “Marjorie Prime,” Tess (Geena Davis) turns to her husband Jon (Tim Robbins) and relates a theory she’s read which suggests that when we remember something, we don’t remember the actual event but the memory of it. We remember remembering — progressively degrading the truth of the past the way a photocopy of a photocopy blurs an image. This is the central tenet of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated play by Jordan Harrison on which the film is based, and it begets the paradox within which the story unfolds: that memories become less true the fonder we are of them, and in a way, the more we remember, the more we forget.
The characters in the story are attempting to defeat that natural process using artificially intelligent means: perfect hologrammatic replicas of their deceased loved ones who learn through conversation and who, unlike their human counterparts, will never die and never forget. Indeed, there is a suggestion that those two processes — death and forgetting — are analogous, and so if a machine can keep your memories alive, it’s a way not only to memorialize all the faces and moments of your life, but for you yourself to live forever. What are any of us but the sum total of the memories we hold, however tenuous their relationship to the actual facts may be? These are deep waters to swim in, heady with esoteric philosophical and ontological quandaries, so the film can perhaps be forgiven its overreliance on dialogue.
Indeed, it’s easy to forgive, as Almereyda makes the smart decision to keep everything else as simple as possible: There are only a few locations, and the calm set design, understated performances and measured editing pace means that though all of the story is communicated through conversations heavy with emotion, regret, nostalgia, guilt and pain, the film does not feel overly dense. And while technically the premise counts as sci-fi, this is not one of those SF conceits that feels hard-edged and lacerating, an acid-wash over reality that reveals contours of utopic or dystopic possibility that we don’t normally see. “Marjorie Prime” is no polemic, nor even a particularly provocative what-if, and it is not really invested in its science at all. The world looks much as it does now (especially if you live in an “active seniors” commercial) except that cellphones are see-through. Instead, the story uses its future-tech premise as gentle kind of thought experiment — more an experiment in musing.
At the start, Marjorie (the wonderful Lois Smith, whose innate warmth raises the thermostat on what otherwise could feel like a chilly story) is talking to Walter (Jon Hamm) — or rather, as we discover soon, to Walter Prime, an AI hologram of her dead husband as she chose to remember him, in the prime (sorry) of his life. This, at least, is very believable; if one had ever been married to Jon Hamm, one would probably choose to remember him exactly as he is now. Walter Prime is there to help Marjorie stave off the loneliness of old age, a present from her daughter Tess and son-in-law Jon, with whom she lives and who are solicitous and attentive towards her, though there seems to be some mother/daughter stuff going on, too. They are evidently a wealthy family (it seems Walter was quite the go-getter when alive), and their house looks out onto sand and the endless rolling surf of the Pacific.
The revelations, when they come, are small ones, but their import is great. Marjorie, battling periods of cloudy senility, tries to convey as much as possible to Walter Prime during her lucid moments, but gradually we discover how even the memories she’s most sure of have details missing or transposed — sometimes that’s natural wastage, but the story’s biggest reveal is of an element of the past that Marjorie has deliberately written out of the narrative, an act of deliberate obfuscation that Jon, in his private conversations with Walter Prime, reinforces. For his part, the hologram Walter can relate those memories back to Marjorie when they’ve slipped her mind again, but when he does so, can we really say he’s remembering? Are these related memories, true or not, actually even memories at all if it’s not a human brain, with all its quirks and fallibilities, that contains them? If there is a blind spot in the film, it might be that the shift in focus away from the human characters onto the artificial happens too late for us to really get into the meaty questions surrounding AI and its applications.
But then, AI is merely the means to an end here, which is to investigate human relationships and human ideas of identity and memory. It’s a hermetically sealed world, and whatever revolution has occurred in human consciousness as a result of the development of a technology as advanced as Walter Prime is left outside the frame. Within it, we get family dynamics and old buried secrets, and an unusually sympathetic portrait of nice people trying to be nice to each other. And when all that threatens to get a little wan, the committed performances bring it back from the brink, along with a sparingly used but typically compelling score by Mica Levi, who once again adds a whole new dimension to the movie, undercutting its tendency to gauziness by giving it an atonal edge.
The film might not have quite learned how to communicate visually rather than verbally, but the words are enticing ones and Sean Price Williams‘ serene, airy cinematography is fluid and varied enough that it never feels stagebound. So even though Almereyda’s directorial impulse seems to be that the images are there to contain the actors speaking words, rather than to build story in their own right, it doesn’t altogether hamper the film’s genteel effectiveness. Because within its narrow field of vision, it does bore deep, right through the more obvious strata to the farther, rarer questions seldom asked regarding our relationship to memory — not just what we remember and why, but who we are remembering for. [B]