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Movie Review: 'Reminiscence' starring Hugh Jackman

Big ideas undermined by bad execution in Reminiscence.

By Sean PatrickPublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 5 min read
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I’m tempted to pat the new movie Reminiscence on its metaphorical head and condescendingly talk about how I appreciate the attempt it makes at being about something more than a Hollywood thriller plot and some mainstream notion of noir. Okay, so that’s what I just did and I kind of hate myself. At the same time, I do appreciate the intentions of Reminiscence. The film calls upon the tragedy of Orpheus and Euripides, and the ongoing tragedy of climate change, in a vain attempt to give an overly familiar macho action movie something to stand for.

Reminiscence stars Hugh Jackman as Nick Bannister, a former veteran now working as a sort of memory detective. Using a high tech waterbed, thingamajig, Nick’s business allows clients to relieve favorite memories and search for things in their past that they’ve lost. The machine is incredible but also dangerous as, if you watch a memory too often, it becomes burned into your mind and you are doomed to relive it forever.

Nick’s side gig is working for the local District Attorney. In this world, memories can be claimed by subpoena and Nick is called when the D.A is trying to make a case against an aging industrialist. Unfortunately, as Nick arrives to do his thing, the industrialist and his shifty eyed son are on their way out the door. The industrialists' lawyers have convinced a judge that he’s not healthy enough to undergo Nick’s memory machine. The industrialist, his wife, and his son, have roles to play later in this story.

The plot of Reminiscence really kicks in with the introduction of Mae (Rebecca Ferguson). The classic femme fatale in a blood red dress, Mae arrives at Nick’s just as he and his partner, Watts (Thandie Newton), are closing up shop. She claims that she lost the keys to her apartment and is hoping that a quick jaunt through her most recent memories will help her find them. In her mind, Nick finds out that Mae is a singer and the song she sings is one that means something to him.

After Mae leaves, it’s found that she ‘forgot’ her earrings, you have to strip to get into the machine, only little bikinis cover for modesty. Thus, Nick can fool himself into thinking that Mae didn’t leave the earrings on purpose and it gives him an excuse to go looking for her. Nick is entranced with Mae and the two begin a torrid and tender love affair. Then, one day, out of the blue, Mae is gone. No explanation, no reason given, just gone.

Nick begins to obsess over her, spending hours traveling through his own memory for a clue that might reveal where she went or why she left. Only Watts is able to keep him from burning his memories into an unbreakable loop in his mind. Unfortunately, getting him to go back to the D.A’s office for work only leads to a new clue about Mae’s whereabouts and a furthering of Nick’s dangerous obsession.

That’s a good plot and it really should work as a movie. Sadly, it sounds so good because it is so very familiar. Reminiscence takes no chances, the film evokes Inception, Chinatown, and a dozen other familiar movies as sops to get you to fall for this story. For those with little moviegoing experience, this might work. For those with a lengthy library of film experience, Reminiscence becomes rather tedious.

Especially bad is the narration delivered by Hugh Jackman. Narration is tricky to pull off and if you don’t absolutely nail it with clever turns of phrase or intriguing insights into your main character, narration can quickly become laughable. Jackman’s attempts at hard-boiled narration borders on parody. The insights are puddle deep and the narration runs out of steam very quickly, transforming into a shorthand meant to help those in the audience who missed something while looking at their phone.

The setting of Reminiscence is interesting and ultimately pointless. The film is set in a futuristic Miami, Florida where climate change has caused the ocean to rise. The response, which feels undeniably realistic, is that we adapt and boats become part of the culture as a means of travel on the streets. The rich use their wealth to dam off what dry land is available creating a visible class difference, a drowned rat class of poor people, an ankle soaked middle class and the dry rich.

The movie gets points for accuracy of what is coming when we fail to heed the climate crisis but the clever visuals do little to add anything other than visual splendor to Reminiscence. In a better movie, the water and the climate change would be more than mere set dressing. Here, the sets feel like a commentary from a different movie with a different, perhaps more interesting story to tell.

Then there is the pretension of Reminiscence. The film wants to be deep so the final act hammers you over the head with the symbolism of the story of Orpheus, the man whose song was so sad that he made the Gods cry and yield to him the chance to retrieve his lover Eurydice from the underworld, Hades. The Gods of the underworld, Hades himself, listens to Orpheus’s song and relents to let him take his love on one condition, he cannot look back and make sure she’s okay until they are out of the pit to hell.

Orpheus, unable to not look back, looks back and watches as his lover is consumed for eternity. The ham-fisted flashbacks at the end of Reminiscence use the literal story of Orpheus to claim depth for its own story about how someone can be destroyed by being unable to stop looking back. In the case of Nick, he can’t stop looking back to try and find Mae and it becomes his own personal hell.

I did enjoy the final scene, a maudlin but effective coda in which the story of Orpheus is the star, but by then, I was already far too bored by the familiarity and rote nature of the plot of Reminiscence. I appreciated the ambition and how ambiguously tragic the ending truly is but ultimately, the movie can’t capitalize on what is good about this scene because by then it is too far gone in the wrong direction.

Reminiscence is now in theaters and on HBO Max as of August 20th, 2021.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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