Lisa Joy’s Reminiscence Slightly Misremembers a Charming Sci-Fi Noir
It was a dark and stormy night in post-apocalyptic Miami. The streets were wet, my best friend was drunk and I was just finishing up my job peddling people’s memories back to them when she walked in. A dame in a red dress. What a cliché. But we come back to clichés, like memories, for a reason. Writer/director Lisa Joy’s film debut, Reminiscence, isn’t just remembering the genre tropes of noir, but refitting them into a sci-fi world as confidently and imperfectly realized as the Westworld she co-created. It often gets stuck in its own loops, subjecting us to the same kind of forced and repeated trips down memory lane that alternatively seduce and damn its characters, but its self-serious update to the classic “gumshoe narrates a tale you know ends bad for the gumshoe” movie still has a few charms—in old ways and new.
A slick amalgamation of homages stuffed into rumpled linen, Reminiscence sticks its screw-up private eye Nick (Hugh Jackman)—who also runs a nostalgia business, literally allowing people to relive old memories, with his boozing war buddy Watts (Thandiwe Newton)—into a Chinatown-like series of run-arounds and red herrings. The big difference is that the femme that’ll quite obviously be fatale for him, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), sings at a lounge on the flooded coast of nocturnal neo-Miami. If Westworld plays with Blade Runner’s replicants, Reminiscence plays with its wet and ruined noir. There’s a conspicuous lack of cigarette smoke, but its haze is replaced by the gauzy curtain of Nick’s Reminiscence machine, which projects its users’ memories in 3-D sepia. Mae needs it to find some lost keys, just the kind of innocuous request apt to send a down-on-his-luck dick gumshoeing for his life. Only, Nick isn’t an entranced cynic nor a truth-and-justice diehard. He’s an earnest romantic, through and through, which makes his labyrinthine journey into the mystery of Mae’s disappearance all the more tragic.
Joy’s script, initially more cynical than its characters, uses the plot to critique this surface-level infatuation: Does Nick really know Mae? Does knowing her past, her activities outside his immediate relationship with her, affect his affection? Male insecurity plays a major part in the film as yet another weakness lured by the temptations of perfect memories. There’s a constant tug of war between Nick seeking truth and Nick seeking comfort, which goes on so long and so explicitly that its characters (to be specific, the film’s women: Watts and Natalie Martinez’s DA) grow exasperated. It’s easy to empathize.
As pleasurable as some of the film’s elements are—Jackman and Ferguson’s romantic chemistry is tantalizing and Joy rightly stages their first sex scene as a horny frenzy—the reflexive nature of its subject matter can wear thin. An escape into familiarity for its characters, an escape into throwback conventions for us. Yet, even returning to well-worn concepts doesn’t always work as it should. Joy’s intriguing world-building clashes with noir voiceover that replaces the genre’s world-weary cleverness with world-explaining exposition. Her mystery seems hell-bent on demystifying every detail and tightening up every loose end. That could be satisfying if done with a lean elegance—especially in contrast to the designed, masochistic uncertainty of Westworld or, to a lesser extent, Inception (a film from Joy’s brother-in-law that here lends its layers of dreamy, escapist unreality)—but Reminiscence is ironically all too happy to luxuriate in flashbacks, callbacks and backtracks. The ending isn’t just thematically dissonant, but twenty minutes of obviousness and repetition.