Marjorie Prime is an affecting and audacious chamber piece: a futurist meditation on memory, mortality and the self. There is a certain sci-fi strangeness that doesn’t preclude an audience being moved, and the continuous thread of Mica Levi’s orchestral score maintains a heightened sense of awareness and even exaltation.
Michael Almereyda directs his own adaptation of a play by Jordan Harrison, and 87-year-old Lois Smith gives a tremendous performance in the lead, having originally played the part in the theatre. You can only imagine the tumultuous curtain call Smith must have received every night, and my slight reservation is that the authentic physical presence of actors on stage might have made this drama’s themes even more effective.
Smith is Marjorie, an old woman in the middle stages of dementia; she was once a celebrated violinist before arthritis compelled her to abandon her vocation. Marjorie lives in a handsome beach house with modernist features and decking: the setting is perhaps inspired by the oceanfront locations in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Still Alice. Marjorie lives on her own. Or does she? In the opening scene, we see her having a conversation with a polite, well-spoken, well-dressed man called Walter, played by Jon Hamm, seated rather primly on her couch, who asks questions about her health, her alertness, her eating.
This conversation is happening in the future and Walter is a “prime”, a next-level holographic-android 3D projection of her late husband, recreated in his handsome 40s, a creation that can appear and move around the place like a very solid-looking ghost. There is no obvious projecting equipment, incidentally, such as that in Blade Runner 2049, nor is there any anti-corporate satire about the technology’s manufacturers. It is all simply taken as read.
Marjorie’s daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins) also live with Marjorie, variously anxious and exasperated at Marjorie’s relationship with this virtual-reality husband. And there is something more. Indiscreet Jon has an escalating problem with drink and prescription drugs and it is he who must take “Walter” aside and inform him (that is, program him) about a family secret that no one talks about: the death of Tess’s brother.
Hamm’s performance is in the studiedly calm C3PO/Siri style, slightly more robotic, in fact, than comparable portrayals in Spike Jonze’s Her or Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, and this weird detachment is not, in fact, entirely consistent with what we are later to learn about “primes”. The movie is to take a sudden turn that at first looks like a huge twist or trick on the audience, but is in fact part of an ambitious progression, a drama whose narrative stages finally give the action a dreamlike atmosphere in which the passage of time is telescoped.
Programming a prime begins to resemble the heartrending business that many carers of dementia sufferers have to go through: having to teach their elderly loved ones who they were and are – having to reconstruct their identities. A potent, and well-developed feat of imagination.
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