by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s first “feature” on the Mars movie night
screening in Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/)
was one of the worst movies I’ve seen recently, a perfect example of what the
late critic Dwight MacDonald called “the Bad Good Movie” — a film that is
obviously aiming high for artistic achievement and depth, but falls so far
short of its ambitions it became virtually unwatchable. It’s called Mr.
Nobody and features a character called
“Nemo Nobody” (Jared Leto) who as the film begins has lived to be 118 years old
— though in his world that’s not
an accomplishment because everyone else is immortal. Humans have figured out
how to live literally forever by regeneratively cloning themselves, so they not
only don’t die but they’re permanently young (or at least youngish). Nemo has become a spectacle because he’s the only
living example of the once-ubiquitous process of human aging — and he’s become
the star of a reality-TV show featuring a poll asking people to log in to say
whether he should be cloned and thus enabled to live forever like everyone
else, or he should be allowed to die. (There’s a nicely chilling scene in which
the votes are recorded on a bar graph and the “death” line rises to be higher
than the “life” line.) The film was a co-production of companies from France,
Gemany, Britain and Canada — indeed, with so much foreign money in the film and
the writer-director, Jaco Dormael, having a clearly foreign name, I was a bit
surprised when it turned out to be in English — and its frame is a series of
disjointed flashbacks of Nemo’s life at various stages as he’s hypnotized by
Dr. Feldheim (Allan Corduner) and interviewed by a reporter. Nemo’s memories
come back but in fits and starts as he recalls bits and pieces of his past —
or, rather, his pasts, as early
in his childhood Nemo had to make a decision to go with his mom or his dad when
they split up, and supposedly the film illustrates both his futures depending on which choice he makes.
If
this sounds familiar, it should — as early as 1934 RKO filmed J. B. Priestley’s
play Dangerous Corner, in which
the action takes place at a dinner party and is told twice, once in which a
tube in the characters’ radio blows out and plunges the party into silence,
from which the characters emerge into conversations that ultimately expose
their secrets; then another telling in which the radio stays functional and so
the conversations stay light and the secrets stay secret. More recent films
that have used this premise include the early-1970’s movie Slaughterhouse
Five (though I haven’t either seen that
film or read Kurt Vonnegut’s source novel since then, one person at our
screening thought of that movie as a precursor to Mr. Nobody) and the 2008 Scott McGehee-David Siegel film Uncertainty (a Run, Lola, Run-like urban chase film that, like Dangerous
Corner, presented two alternative
renderings of its story based on one key choice the characters make) along with
Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her and
the movie I kept thinking of when
I was watching this one, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Indeed, after Mr. Nobody was over I said, “It’s Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind with all the warmth,
humanity and emotion taken out!” Supposedly the various events of Nemo Nobody’s
life are seen from two vantage points — one in which he stays with his mom and
moves with her from Britain to Canada (I think) when they break up, one in
which he stays with his dad — though that point is made far more clearly in the
synopses than in the film itself. He has at least two, possibly three, women he
proclaims as the great love of his life: in the story in which he grows up with
his dad her name is Elise (Sarah Polley) and she falls victim to depression and
ultimately kills herself — at least we think she kills herself — while in the (more interesting)
story in which he stays with his mom his great love is Anna (Diane Kruger),
whom he meets when his mom remarries.
Anna is his stepfather’s daughter by his previous wife, and she and Nemo end up in one of
those weird relationships, like the one between Henry Frankenstein and
Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, that’s emotionally incestuous even though the lovers are not biological
kin. They’re separated when stepdad leaves mom in shock over the discovery that
his natural daughter is having an affair with his stepson, and they meet again
years later but circumstances still keep them apart (she writes her phone
number on a slip of paper — which, like the typewriter on which Nemo writes his
reminiscences, is one of those incongruously retro references in a story
ostensibly set in the future — but a stray drop of rain washes the ink away and
renders the number illegible). There’s also a third woman in Nemo’s bed, an
Asian whom he marries on the rebound after Elise (ya remember Elise?) tells him she’s not interested in him because she
still has a crush on a guy named Stefano even though Stefano isn’t at all
interested in her. (This sounds like Cole Porter’s marvelously cynical song, “I
Loved Him, but He Didn’t Love Me,” in which the punch line is the singer
lamenting that they’ve changed their minds and now “he loves me, but I don’t
love him.” It’s the sort of thing a Gay songwriter would think of!) At some point one of the Nemos has kids
with one of the wives, and they’re two boys named Paul and Michael (I wonder if
writer-director Van Dormael was thinking of Paul McCartney and his brother Michael), and one of the more annoying
gimmicks in a film full of them is that the various Nemos keep dying — one in a
motorcycle crash, one in a car crash, one when he’s shot in a bathtub by a
professional assassin and one a simple drowning because one of the Nemos is
afraid of water and can’t swim, while the other is so unafraid of swimming
pools he works as a pool maintenance person and dreams of someday becoming rich
enough to own a big house and a pool of his own.
If Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind is an example of how
to do a non-linear movie that plays fair with its audience and is actually
emotionally moving, Mr. Nobody is
an example of how not to; about the only genuinely entertaining aspect of Mr.
Nobody is getting to look at cute Jared
Leto during much of its running time (especially when he’s shown either in
close-ups of his angelically beautiful baby face — it’s a major disappointment
when the character gets old enough to shave — or in mid-shots that show off a
quite impressive basket), and that’s not enough to sustain interest through a 2
½-hour movie, especially since through all too much of it Leto is in age makeup
reminiscent of what Stanley Kubrick put Keir Dullea through in the later stages
of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It
didn’t help that we were watching a 153-minute “director’s cut” version (the
standard DVD is 141 minutes and the theatrical release was 138 minutes) that —
unlike the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect, another movie on the same premise but a far better
film (at least with the director’s original ending instead of the stupid one
tacked onto the theatrical release) — probably just added length and even more
mind-boggling complexity (and stupid complexity rather than artistically
legitimate complexity) to an already long and dreary film. And, in case you
were wondering what this film’s connection to Mars was, at one point Nemo takes
a regular excursion flight to Mars as part of a group tour of the Red Planet —
or does he only imagine that such
flights are available and he takes one? Frankly, we don’t know and we (or at
least I) don’t care!
