Jon Hamm and Lois Smith (Film Rise)
We preserve the memory of our departed loved ones through photographs and video. Bbut what if a computer simulation could enable us to speak to the dead? Based on the play by Jordan Harrison, Marjorie Prime is a chilling, heartbreaking observation of memory and our uneasy intimacy with technology.
The film opens with the elderly Marjorie (Lois Smith) speaking with Walter (Jon Hamm), whom we learn is a “Prime,” a hologram of her late husband. Marjorie’s daughter (Geena Davis) and son-in-law (Tim Robbins) have provided Marjorie with this artificial intelligence to help keep her company, but the simulation is imperfect. This Potemkin Walter is still trying to figure out, through interaction, exactly who he was, and he seems hard-wired to provide certain boilerplate responses of concern.
Marjorie suggests a low-key Blade Runner, asking profound questions about what it means to be human; but while Ridley Scott’s movie, ready for its belated sequel to open this fall, came at a time when society was just on the verge of interacting with computers, such things are commonplace now. Shot in just a few different locations, the movie for the most part takes place in a modern luxury home, set at some unspecified point in the future (the way the timeline seems to work, I’d guess it was 20 or 30 years from now). It’s a future that looks just like today. Cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who usually lends a gritty eye to films by Alex Ross Perry and the Safdies, uses a cooler touch here to convey the domestic alienation, and the score by Mica Levi accents this alienation with mournful cues that evoke repressed emotions.
With a career that began in the ’50s, the now 86-year old Smith is one of the great character actors. She’s perfect as a woman who is alternately accepting and skeptical of her marital simulation, doubting its memory and her own.
As suits a film that is also about memory, Marjorie has echoes of Last Year at Marienbad, and the leading players’ varied histories almost beg us to remember what they looked like the last time we saw them; it’s distracting that the actress who plays the young Marjorie looks nothing like the young Lois Smith, especially when the film shows you actual photos of Smith from her early days, but this is a minor quibble. Director Michael Almereyda can be erratic; in the past few years he’s made the excellent, inventive psychological drama Experimenter, but also the unengaging documentary Escapes. With this low-budget science fiction drama, he’s back on track. Marjorie Prime is indeed flawed like memory, but its depiction of a society that uses technology to fend off loneliness is quietly wrenching.
Marjorie Prime
Written and directed by Michael Almereyda, based on the play by Jordan Harrison
With Lois Smith, Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Tim Robbins.
Not rated; contains strong language
99 minutes.
Opens today at Angelika Pop-Up
