Michael Almereyda’s new film Marjorie Prime couldn’t be smaller—you can practically put it in your pocket. Four primary characters, a cast list that bulges to ten all told, one house, and a head-shaker of a central concept: a computer program that can create full-on hologram replicas of dead loved ones, for whatever purpose you may have for them.
We’re plopped down in a lovely beach chateau between septuagenarian Marjorie (Lois Smith) and spry 40s hunk Walter (Jon Hamm), sitting in the living room, talking. Only eventually do we realize that Walter is the dead husband, as he looked decades before, created and summoned to ease Marjorie’s loneliness as she slowly succumbs to Alzheimer’s.
At first blush this may evoke that episode of Black Mirror for you, the one in which a young grieving widow signs up for a social-media simulacrum of her late hubby, and eventually his androidal replacement. But the comparison only demonstrates how TV tends to reach for the klaxxon and take every concept too literally, while films can take metaphors for the beautiful things they are.
Adapted from a play by Jordan Harrison, Almereyda’s film is very much a series of dialogues, about loomingly human issues—especially memory. Because the “Prime” program needs to be informed and taught about the person it’s duplicating, Smith’s Marjorie hears her own faulty memories come back as remembered fact, and then the forgetting starts all over again.
This confounding arrangement is supported by Marjorie’s grown daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins). The movie ends up being about them, or about the family in toto, past and present, which encompasses a suicide, a misremembered succession of dogs, acres of narcissism and neglect, and now a swamp of bitterness.
Hamm’s Walter, in the present as a hologram, appearing and disappearing quite like a ghost, must try to assimilate the knowledge that he was a bad husband and father. Marjorie, freed from emotional responsibility by her illness, summons the memory of their dead son, who no one had mentioned in 50 years.
Then the film jumps into the future, and Marjorie herself, dead offscreen, becomes a Prime talking-mate for the tightly coiled and entirely unsettled Tess. (Teaching the Prime, she says, is not unlike talking to an Alzheimer’s patient.) The movie continues to leap forward, and suffice it to say that the Prime paradigm itself is an effortlessly slick metaphoric mirror for the uneasy relationships we have with the great triangulated slippages of human life: the inevitability of biological aging, the inadequacy of memory, and the unstoppable death march of time.
The Prime paradigm is a metaphoric mirror for the uneasy relationships we have with the great triangulated slippages of human life: the inevitability of biological aging, the inadequacy of memory, and the unstoppable death march of time.
Four people in a house, some of them virtual. An idiosyncratic ultra-indie whose filmography began in the ‘80s, Almereyda is a restless intelligence, and his movies tend to be ironic/analytical, from his downtown-romance experiment shot entirely on a Fisher-Price Pixelvision toy camera, Another Girl Another Planet (1992), to last year’s icy Experimenter, which coolly explored the story of the Stanley Milgram obedience-behavior experiments. Here, his objectifying tone indulges the staginess of Harrison’s play a little, but it also lets the ideas roam around unshackled by melodrama.
The cast is completely up for it. Davis is gradually kind of terrifying in her weaponized emotional dissatisfaction, while Robbins is enjoying the best and most intelligent role he’s had in years. Jon is the reasonable outsider, watching the tide of this family’s poisoned legacy slowly swallow his life. Drinking steadily throughout, silent about the fissure between his wife and their alienated (and entirely offscreen) daughter, Robbins’s modern husband is our eyes and ears, searching everything anyone says for pieces of the either forgotten or hidden past.
Geena Davis as Tess in “Marjorie Prime,” directed by Michael Almereyda and based on the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play by Jordan Harrison.
Marjorie Prime is a very small movie—but if it were any bigger it might feel inflated, grandiose, maybe a kind of Christopher Nolan-ish gloss on memory-as-time-travel. Instead, it is one of those prize indies that spools out and grows in your head for days afterwards.
Some of us might think we would like a Prime replacement of a loved one, but would we? Would our memories still grow unstable? Will, as the enigmatic end of Almereyda’s film suggests, technology outlive us all? Do you, or your memories, or your family history, really want to live forever?
Michael Atkinson is a writer, poet and film critic. His latest book is the novel Hemingway Cutthroat.