An ominous strain of music accompanies Marjorie (Lois Smith) as she shuffles through her home, stopping when she sits in a chair and the camera pivots to reveal Walter (Jon Hamm). This immediately inserts a strange tension into their interactions, made all the more unsettling by the curious patterns of Walter’s speech as he talks to the woman. The much-younger Walter expresses concern for Marjorie’s arthritis and then begins to reminisce with her about her long-ago memories of banalities like old dogs, things he should not be able to recall. Throughout, he speaks with a dreamy detachment, as if responding to prompts and regurgitating facts more than genuinely conversing. Eventually, the ruse comes out: Walter is a hologram, a projection of the younger version of Marjorie’s late husband who provides comfort to the woman as she fades away.
As science fiction, Marjorie Prime never drifts far enough outside of domestic confines to get bogged down with any more technological details than are necessary. The technological breakthrough of the living holograms is itself so preoccupied with memory that much of the movie sifts through the relics of an older age. Love letters, physical photographs, household trinkets that each contain a story, these are the film’s materials, and their mere presence raises unsettling questions of how the young of the present will be remembered in the future with so much of their footprints written in the sand of cloud storage and social media. As in Her, the cinematography stresses crisp flatness filtered through a slight haze of light brown. It’s suggestive of a future aesthetically determined by Apple, with clean design offering the spectre of choice and expression only in the artificial warmth of stock palettes.
Of course, the discomfiting sight of a long-dead man resurrected in the prime of its youth has an impact beyond mere nostalgia, and Walter Prime influences Marjorie and her family in various ways. The woman herself becomes more and more attached to her ghost, able to fondly recall happier memories while able to omit darker elements of her past. Marjorie’s daughter, Tess (Geena Davis), on the other hand, is completely disturbed by the illusion, both for its falsity and for the suggestion of her own complicated feelings for her father resurfacing. Meanwhile, Tess’s husband, Jon (Tim Robbins), plays the neutral party, supporting Marjorie’s ability to find comfort in her painful last days but growing ever more suspicious of the hologram, eventually taunting it for being programmed without any of Marjorie’s unpleasant memories, highlighting the falsity of nostalgia without its darker side.
Soon, everyone, including a live-in caretaker (Stephanie Andujar), begins to confess things to the hologram, lured into the potential of having a sympathetic ear that cannot pass judgment or reveal secrets. Even in Tess and Jon’s flashes of anger toward Walter Prime, however, the actors all maintain a muted sense of emotion that sands away the distinctions between real humans and Walter’s façade. This sets up the film’s second half, in which copies of loved ones begin to proliferate, providing a chain of increasingly hollow solace that suggests a world perpetually locked in grief, one that will become more and more reliant on technology as physical mementos wane.
This concluding arc is thought-provoking, and it produces some of the film’s most touching scenes in scenes that show holograms being set up and learning their characters, but it also swings too far into the dead-end logic of the premise. What is otherwise a calm meditation on death and how we approach it instead becomes more like an episode of “Black Mirror,” subordinating its emotional weight underneath the narrative foundation and necessary twists. Nowhere is this clearer than in a post-human coda that vaguely recalls the ostensibly serene but secretly horrific ending of A.I. but lacks the follow-through of its implications. The scene is somber where it should be disturbing, an issue that recurs throughout the film despite the best efforts of Mica Levi’s glissandi-laden score, which wraps Blade Runner-esque synthetic longing around a tense core of coiled springs. Levi knows what the film should be and occasionally is, but too often there is a clear split between the music and image in a succinct summary of the film’s frustrating tendency to follow its narrative threads more than its emotional ones.
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