Keswick Film Club - Marjorie Prime

Synopsis

We start the new year with a comedy/drama to remind us that it is easy to forget… or have we just remembered it wrong? It isn’t just too much partying over Christmas! Marjorie has grown old and has problems remembering her past. This being 'the future', her family are trying to help by hiring a hologram/AI robot that is programmed to be (and looks) just like her dead husband Walter did in his forties. This clever hologram gets better and better at 'being' someone the more information it gleans. This does indeed help; Marjorie finds she gets on better with 'young Walter' than she does with her children, especially as she shares more and more memories with 'him'. There is a problem though: are her memories real? When 'he' speaks to the other family members, they give 'him' a different history; they all believe they are telling the truth - who should 'he' believe?

Director Michael Almereyda's most successful film was probably his version of 'Hamlet' set in modern day America, "Now, he is back with 'Marjorie Prime', a clever and affecting meditation on memory, bereavement, love and remorse" - Geoffrey Macnab, Independent. He is well supported with a great cast too - Lois Smith plays Marjorie, with Jon Hamm as Walter and Geena Davis and Tim Robbins as her daughter and son-in-law. Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post says "It re-assures and unsettles in equal, exquisitely calibrated measure. Viewers are left with the Faulknerian sense that, one day, the past won’t just be alive: it won’t even be past at all". I guess that would mean that we could watch our favourite movies again and again...for the first time! I can't wait for the conversation in the pub after this one...