Movie Review: Memory

 

Michael's Movie Grade: A-

A beautiful and moving romantic film. 

This is the type of movie that contains moments of real joy but at the same time is not afraid to make you feel complete and utter discomfort. Much of this film can be very hard to watch but if you push through the uncomfortable times, they in fact make this movie all the more rewarding and beautiful. This is a romance movie at its heart, but it is not in any way your traditional one. A single mother goes to a high school reunion and finds herself being followed home by a strange man. She soon learns that this man has dementia and can't remember why he followed her. She begins to start an unlikely friendship with this man, when his family hires her to watch after him. The two then fall in love. Like any great romance movie, this film works because we care deeply about these characters. Both of them are far from perfect people, but underneath their flaws, they have truly beautiful hearts. Over the course of the movie, these characters grow to feel completely real to us, and we feel ever single emotion along with them. Even when they clearly make the wrong choices, it doesn't even slightly affect how much we care about them. In many ways these characters are two tormented souls and the happiness they find in each other is one that we are able to feel as well. Yet there is even more to this film than this romance. Our main character was sexually abused as a child and her mother did not believe her at all. This helps lead to her being an overprotective mother, falling into alcoholism and her having a complicated relationship with her sister (who knew about this). Before we know about all this, we see her going through an elaborate closing and locking of her door every time she gets home. This is wonderful visual filmmaking that tells us so much about this character without a word of dialogue. This part of the story leads to the most uncomfortable and emotional scenes in the film. Yet it makes this film feel all the more real and human. It can also provide a very intelligent and thoughtful look at an incredibly uncomfortable subject matter. 

This is a truly wonderful movie.