Following in the footsteps of his last few films, Mark Pellington’s Nostalgia is a protracted rumination on the nature of grief and loss that’s more laborious than illuminating. Drawn from an experimental screenplay by Listen Up Philip filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, it’s a movie so concerned with adequately capturing the textures and details of humans in mourning that it forgets the rest of us are going to have to actually sit through this deeply unpleasant experience.
Though Jon Hamm’s face is plastered over the film’s promos, Nostalgia doesn’t have a singular star, unless you count the abstract concept of sadness. Hamm himself doesn’t show up for nearly an hour of the film’s bloated runtime. Rather than penning a straightforward, plot-driven narrative, Pellington and Perry have conjured a script designed to move more like an album than a movie. Each scene, typically a languid character piece with long takes and pages upon pages of monologuing, plays out like a song that blends into the next track, with each member of the cast passing along the torch to the next like a relay race.
It’s not an altogether terrible way to construct a film, but if Nostalgia were an album, it’d be a chore to listen to, with each song sounding roughly the same and involving little change in tempo or subject matter. The film’s strength lies in the breathing room each performer is given to stretch their wings and experiment. Taken scene by scene, it’s genuinely thrilling to see actors like Ellen Burstyn and Bruce Dern given such wide berth to do what they do best, without cuts interrupting their stirring work. Each spotlight moment a major character experiences feels like an extended remix of the little video they play at the Oscars for the acting nominees, which means that in the moment, the audience gets swept up in the sheer emotion on display, but by the fourth or fifth monologue, they’re just bored stiff.
Those moments never feel earned. In each segment, we meet someone mourning a loved one who has died and engaging with the objects and memorabilia they’ve left behind, facilitated initially by interactions with John Ortiz as an insurance adjuster, and then later, Hamm as a man in antiquities. Each of these two men display great chemistry with Burstyn, whose character has lost her husband and is considering selling a signed baseball he prized his whole life. Watching her measure the sum-total worth of what he’s left behind with two men both versed in communicating with grieving clients is an intimate spectacle, but when every single scene is cranked to 11 on the weepy scale, it’s hard to feel much of anything.
In a comedy, there’s no such thing as too many jokes, but in a drama, there’s an upper limit to how depressed the average filmgoer can withstand feeling. While its central performances are impressive, Nostalgia’s overall effect is that of a self-defeating film, the cinematic equivalent of eating a four-course meal that’s all broccoli prepared in various ways. The film’s final segment, concerning Hamm’s character and his sister, played by Catherine Keener, is actually its strongest, but by the time we get to this legitimately compelling chapter, we’re all cried out and are numb to the tragedy that befalls their family. It’d be one thing if that was somehow the purpose of the film, to make the audience feel the way insurance adjusters and antiquities men feel when they assess property from deceased loved ones, but the film isn’t structured in such a way for that to truly be the case.
Nostalgia is a beautifully photographed film, with affecting performances from some of the best actors working today. But it’s maudlin to a fault, a relentless indulgence of hanky-pulling that fails its audience by never providing a real emotional respite from the film’s successive troughs in mood and tone. Perhaps a little more levity or narrative variety wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world.
The post Nostalgia appeared first on Spectrum Culture.