Michael Almereyda (2017)

If you could be reunited with a long-known loved one who’s died, what age would you want them to be?   This familiar metaphysical poser is central to Marjorie Prime, adapted by Michael Almereyda from Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated stage play of the same name (first performed in 2014).  The premise is that, by the middle of this century, technology will enable the creation of holographic projections of the deceased, and their survivors to communicate with these holograms.  The film starts with a conversation between octogenarian Marjorie (Lois Smith) and forty-something Walter (Jon Hamm), soon revealed to be a computer-designed resurrection, known as a ‘Prime’, of Marjorie’s late husband.  In advanced democracies, a person’s gender is already becoming a matter of consumer choice.  It feels almost logical that, in two or three decades’ time, those with the inclination (and financial means?) to do so will be able to select a favourite version and enjoy the quasi-company of their dear departed.  Almost more surprising in the film’s set-up is that an American woman born in the 1960s has a name that was popular many decades earlier.  Walter seems less oddly antique – it emerges that he was Marjorie’s senior by some years (and memories of Walter White, the baby-boomer protagonist of Breaking Bad, will still be fresh in many minds).  Even so, it’s mildly disappointing that the futuristic Marjorie Prime doesn’t vindicate, in transatlantic terms, Alan Bennett’s thoughts in Telling Tales (published in 2000):

‘One of the ways the young think they are safeguarded against the fate and future of their grandparents is by their names:  Sharons don’t suffer from dementia or Damians from incontinence.  … And if a Darren dies, it’s in a motorway pile-up, not a sunshine home.  But not for much longer.’

The advent of Walter Prime causes tension between Marjorie, who is suffering from dementia, and her daughter Tess (Geena Davis).  Tess’s unease must in part be down to the presence of a prime-of-life copy of her father that makes him younger than she now is.  The tension remains until a scene between Tess and her mother where not only is the mood calmer but the appearance of Marjorie less unkempt than before:  we twig that Marjorie has died and that this is Marjorie Prime.  One might suspect that Tess’s selection of a pre-senile but still elderly version of her mother reflects economical casting rather than personal choice but it’s plausible in view of the doleful family history that emerges:  a younger model of Marjorie might have reminded Tess more painfully of this.  Marjorie and Walter had a son who committed suicide and whose name – Damian! – went unspoken by his mother for forty years, until she reached her dotage.  Marjorie’s computerisation announces the structure of what’s to follow.  In due course, Tess becomes Tess Prime – a companion for her grieving husband Jon (Tim Robbins), whose reliance on a bottle of Scotch increases in tandem with the accumulating gloom of the narrative.  Tess too, Jon reveals, has taken her own life.

I’ve an excessive appetite for extended melancholy conversations on screen but Marjorie Prime more than satisfied it.  The setting – an isolated house by the sea, with tasteful, chilly décor – recalls Woody Allen’s Bergman-indebted Interiors (1978) but the characters, except for Marjorie, are low-key, to put it mildly.  All four principals give scrupulous, controlled performances but the measured delivery of lines, rarely interrupted by raised voices, proves to be less hypnotic than soporific.  Michael Almereyda is clearly keen to subtilise the apparent differences between living people and their post-mortem Primes but the prevailing lack of animation of the people on the screen – even in the occasional flashbacks to their younger selves (Hannah Gross plays Marjorie in the early stages of her relationship with Walter) – is problematic.  It’s curious in a piece that predicates a painful gulf between the living and the dead.  There are lovely shots of fading light over the sea and tragic music (another impressive Mica Levi creation) but they contribute to a generalised atmosphere of regret.  An elegiac pall envelops the film.   The high suicide rate within the family doesn’t exactly create a sense of existence being, as well as transient, precious.

Almereyda may not intend the details of how Primes operate to eclipse their relationships with human beings but they did for this viewer.  The hologram, although a precise physical copy of the person it replaces, is otherwise a virtual tabula rasa.  In order to become a functioning replica, it needs living people to supply facts about its human counterpart and their experiences of that person.  The facts are then logged in the memory of the Prime, which isn’t restricted to interactions with a single individual.  Whereas Tess refuses to speak to Walter Prime, Jon supplies him a large part of the data that he assimilates, including the family secret about Damian.  The basic initial programming apparently includes knowledge of the Prime’s therapeutic purpose:  more than one Prime request to a human for information comes with an assurance that ‘I can help you’.  Marjorie regrets that Walter proposed to her the same evening they watched My Best Friend’s Wedding.   It would be much nicer, she says, if they’d watched Casablanca instead.  If she substitutes it for the truth, she wonders aloud to Walter Prime, will he register that she’s making it up?    The question remains unanswered though Walter Prime, from what he says in the film’s last scene, seems to have accepted the substitution of Casablanca without qualification.

Given the subject matter, it sounds like a good idea that, from the outset, Marjorie’s memory is failing but though I know my own brainpower is in decline, I couldn’t see that the implications of this were followed through.  Marjorie Prime isn’t too concerned with the technicalities of its controlling idea.  The viewer isn’t meant to watch the finale – a three-way conversation involving the Primes of Marjorie, Walter and Tess, many years in the future – wondering why a Prime persists after the death of the person who originally felt a need and placed an order for them.  All three of Marjorie, Walter and Tess might have remained important to the sole human survivor Jon but a brief insert shows him as, by now, geriatric and infirm – past caring about Primes.  (If he weren’t and still wanted them, that would raise a different question:  since it wasn’t Jon who chose the Prime ages of his parents-in-law, could he, if he so wished, get those changed?)  Except for Marjorie’s ambiguous closing line (‘It must be nice to have loved someone’), the Primes’ concluding conversation implies that they are either unaware or unwilling to admit that they’re holographic facsimiles.  At this stage, they seem to be morphing from computer programmes into a more traditional conception:  ghosts persisting in a thin, sad, ongoing afterlife – though stuck at the age someone else preferred them to be.  I may well have misunderstood all this (and definitely didn’t grasp the significance of the stuff about the family dog(s) in the last scene).  But I got the impression the film wanted to jettison its sci-fi underpinning in favour of fuzzier ideas of the we-are-what-others-remember-about-us variety.

For me, Marjorie Prime derives what emotional power it has from the sense of ageing and implicit mortality that the actors bring to the screen, awareness of which depends on film-going memory.  Jon Hamm, although more effective than in other recent cinema roles, is inevitably at a disadvantage in this respect: a good deal younger than any of the other three leads, his screen life, for most viewers, began as recently as 2007 when Mad Men was in its first season.  There’s a more potent difference between the Geena Davis and Tim Robbins who came to fame in the 1980s and the senior citizens we now see.  The effect is magnified by how rarely they’ve appeared on the big screen in recent years – that’s especially the case with Davis, whose playing is the most delicately nuanced in the film.  Most poignant of all is Lois Smith – not least when the camera travels across a series of framed photographs of Marjorie at different ages in her long life, and which are actually photographs of the actress playing her.  Smith, who turned eighty-seven earlier this month, inaugurated the role of Marjorie when Jordan Harrison’s play had its first production in Los Angeles, and played it again Off Broadway the following year.  Michael Almereyda has done well to retain her services – and give Lois Smith, whose movie career goes all the way back to East of Eden (1955) and who is perhaps best known for her role in Five Easy Pieces (1970), a very belated star turn.  She makes the most of the opportunity.

13 November 2017