Memory
Written and directed by Michel Franco
Starring Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard and Merritt Wever
Classification N/A; 100 minutes
Opens in select theatres Jan. 19
Critic’s Pick
It is amazing how two stars can sustain the most rickety of productions – especially when those performers typically approach acting from opposite ends when it comes to style, tenor and presence.
In the new drama Memory, Jessica Chastain stars as Sylvia, a New York social worker and single mother who is struggling to raise her teenage daughter while reckoning with her past as an alcoholic. Peter Sarsgaard, meanwhile, plays Saul, a widower suffering from early onset dementia who strikes up a tenuous relationship with Sylvia, one that may or may not be rooted in their shared past.
Directed and written by Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco, a polarizing force on the art-house circuit, Memory sometimes strains under the weight of its aggressive self-seriousness. Like Franco’s other films, this is a movie laced with nauseating twists that pivot on cruelty and test audience’s limits for sadism. Yet unlike the confident energy that carried his 2022 character study Sundown or 2020 eat-the-rich thriller New Order, there is an air in Memory of narrative and aesthetic restlessness that can deteriorate into exhaustion.
As Sylvia and Saul’s relationship intensifies, so do the anxieties of their family members – including Sylvia’s sister Olivia (Merritt Wever) and Saul’s brother-slash-caretaker Isaac (Josh Charles), at least one of whom is carrying around devastating secrets that seem to exist only to ensure maximum dramatic complications. Often, it seems that Franco is just tossing obstacles on the screen, confident that his stars can duck and weave with enough finesse to make the whole endeavour worthwhile.
And the worst-best part? He is absolutely right.
Chastain and Sarsgaard are both remarkable from beginning to end, each finding something honest and captivating in characters that Franco doesn’t seem to have thought about all that deeply, or even care much for. The way that the two stars dig into Sylvia and Saul, two obviously broken people who have little chance of making the other one whole, is a stubbornly impressive magic act that requires determination, imagination and deep reservoirs of empathy.
Their work together results in a combustive chemistry, one that’s less about bouncing off one another than ensuring each of their jagged pieces snap together in place. And it is all the more impressive given that Chastain and Sarsgaard find their way to each other here after developing radically different approaches to performance over the course of their careers.
Chastain, the Molly’s Game and Zero Dark Thirty force of nature, has become a reliably big, bright, intense presence who doesn’t so much find the spotlight as she steals it with earned gusto. Meanwhile, her Memory co-star has spent decades perfecting a more slippery kind of all under-the-skin magnetism, preferring to sink into roles rather than commandeer them. Pairing the two isn’t so much oil and water as it is fire and ice.
Yet Chastain and Sarsgaard find all the pieces of Franco’s Memory worth saving, and proceed to connect with one another to build something that is new, remarkable, affecting. Hard to forget, even.
Barry Hertz