Marjorie Prime (2017): Remember?

Marjorie Prime is a strangely charming, emotionally evocative, thought provoking little movie that was released in August 2017 to considerable critical acclaim, but little public notice. I imagine the distributor didn’t know what to make of a small, intelligent, talky drama about memory and loss.  In any event, little was done to promote it. I was completely unaware of the picture at the time. The movie quickly became available on video and has since found its audience. 

I initially saw Marjorie Prime in November 2017 on the advice of a friend, and just loved it. In fact, when I mentioned this movie in my recent review of Tesla, which also was written and directed by Michael Almereyda, I was sure I had reviewed the film back then. But it turns out I started to write that review but never finished it. Maybe this was a good thing, because when I decided to finish the review this week, I took the opportunity to watch the movie again. On my second viewing, not only did the picture hold up – legitimizing what I remember as a quite favorable first impression - but in many ways it was enriched the second time around. 

What’s it about? From the official website: 

            In the near future, a time of artificial intelligence, 86-year-old Marjorie - a jumble of disparate, fading memories, has a handsome new companion who looks like her deceased husband and is programmed to feed the story of her life back to her. What would we remember, and what would we forget, if given the chance? Marjorie Prime is based on Jordan Harrison's Pulitzer - nominated play, exploring memory and identity, love and loss. 

This tells you too much, perhaps, and at the same time Is an inadequate and not very enticing synopsis. So, let me augment a little. First off, the idea is that computer generated holograms designed to look and sound exactly like a loved one, and learning as they go, have been developed to serve as companions, confidants and, well, friends for elders like Marjorie, as well as for people suffering profound grief, depression and other human difficulties of that sort. Marjorie, an intelligent, well-educated, cultured woman - once a highly accomplished violinist – has been slipping lately - both her health and her memory. Her family has gotten her one of these holographic companions, known as “primes”, to keep her company and help her maintain the memories she has left. 

Marjorie Prime features superb acting by a small ensemble, starring Lois Smith and Jon Hamm. Smith, 87 at the time, is simply terrific as Marjorie, sympathetically reflecting her intelligence on the one hand and her troubled spirit on the other: awareness and concern about her gradually corroding memory and the increasing burden she presents to her family. Still, she seems more at peace with her impending demise than everyone else in her orbit. Hamm, in the best performance I’ve seen from him since the early days of Don Draper, plays an incarnation of her late husband Walter, who has been dead for fifteen years now. Interestingly, Marjorie has selected an image of her husband not as he looked near the end of his life, but as she remembers him in his mid-40s prime (no pun intended). Walter Prime, as he’s referred to, is an absolute marvel – in manner, tone, personality, intellect and usefulness. Where Marjorie has memory lapses, Walter Prime has data gaps – which Marjorie’s daughter and son-in-law, and sometimes Marjorie herself, fill in from time to time, to which he soothingly replies, “I’ll remember that,” and he does. Remarkably, he thinks for himself as circumstances warrant - imagine Alexa with agency and a physical presence; for example, when he suspects that a troubled Marjorie might be soothed by some music, he’ll selects something he thinks she’d like to hear, turns it on, and asks, “Is this all right?”  Truth be told, Marjorie quite enjoys talking with him.

The primary supporting cast of Geena Davis as Marjorie’s fifty-something daughter Tess and Tim Robbins as Tess’s husband/Marjorie’s son-in-law Jon is also superlative. Tess and Jon moved in with Marjorie sometime after Walter’s death to help care for her. Money was not an issue – these folks are well off, to say the least. Tess is smart and extremely competent but has a lot of unresolved issues with her mother - something we’d expect in this sort of domestic drama.  Jon, as the outsider – though he and Tess have been married for thirty years or more – is the more philosophical, “objective” one and tries to help his wife maintain an even keel. There are family secrets haunting this group that gradually and artfully emerge. But I won’t tell.

Even if I hadn't mentioned it already, you'd quickly - within the first five or ten minutes -presuppose that Marjorie Prime started out as a stage play.  There is little of what we’d call action. It is mostly conversation – clever, revealing, wryly honest; much of which occurs in and around Marjorie’s lovely seaside home – mostly in the living room or sitting at the dining room table. The movie was filmed in Amagansett in far eastern Long Island, and the setting of the house, with its lookout over the wide, empty, sandy beach and the powerful, endlessly crashing waves of the Atlantic just beyond, provides a visual and philosophic respite from the physical and psychological interiority of much of the story.

Thematically, Marjorie Prime is concerned with aging, of course, but particularly and at the same time more generally, with ideas about the intersection of memory and identity. When we are young, our sense of who we are as individuals is defined by our temperament, our personal history (i.e. memories and understandings of our past), and by our so-called potential – hopes and expectations for the future. Who we will be is as much if not more the issue than who we are now.  As we approach the other end of life, however, identity morphs into a contemplation of who we were. Future aspirations are less relevant (or achievable), while memory inevitably assumes a more prominent role. 

Remembrances are selective, highly subjective and notoriously unreliable. The scientific consensus seems to be that what we call a memory isn’t a recollection of what actually happened or even an accurate replaying of our original experience. Rather, when we “remember” an experience, we reconstruct it from the images, sensations and emotions that our mind brought up the last time we tried to recall it. We are retrieving our last visit to the memory, not the original data. As Tess explains to Jon during the film, what we call memory is like a copy of a copy of a copy of an old photo. Each time we revisit, the “memory” is modified in some way – simplified by the omission of some details, shaded by our ego or conscience or emotional state, by our natural tendency to be the hero of our own story and our desire to see ourselves as right most of the time. 

Pop quiz:     When Marjorie and her A.I. companion Walter Prime discuss the past and he asks her if she remembers this or that emotionally redolent event from “their” past, does it matter if the recollected story is complete or accurate or actually true at all? How about if the conversation is between Marjorie and her daughter Tess? Or between Tess and Jon, discussing Marjorie’s life memories?  [Hint: somehow, even to us in the audience, the “truth” does seem to matter.]

Does it make a difference if the story is recalled by an A.I. holographic person or a biological person?             -  Discuss.

When Marjorie Prime won the Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, the jury lauded its “imaginative and nuanced depiction of the evolving relationship between humans and technology, and its moving dramatization of how intelligent machines can challenge our notions of identity memory and mortality.“ The critical consensus on the film more generally is pretty high – it has a 90% “Tomatometer” score on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metascore of 82 on Metacritic.com.  In fact, most everyone I know who has seen this picture has quite enjoyed it. 

If, like me, you liked Spike Jonze’s Her starring Joaquin Phoenix a few years back – in which a lonely writer falls in love with a personalized (audible but not visible) operating system called Samantha (seductively voiced by Scarlett Johansson) - I think you’ll also quite like Marjorie Prime. The story in this movie is completely different, but the focus on the potential benefits of and the human repercussions from AI is similar. Even if Her left you cold, you may well find that the homey domesticity of Marjorie Prime and its far less flashy use of a similar sci-fi premise is more appealing and interesting.

99 minutes  

Grade: A-

Available free with Amazon Prime Video and with the library-affiliated streaming services Kanopy and Hoopla (both of which require membership in an affiliated public or university library). Also available to rent from AppleTV, Vudu, Google Play, Amazon, and other streaming services.