Marjorie Prime

Jon Hamm and Lois Smith practicing the talking cure in Marjorie Prime

Michael Almereyda's Marjorie Prime, adapted by the director from a play by Jordan Harrison, strikes me as one of the better American movies of 2017 and a capstone to Almereyda's varied career. Almereyda has worked on the fringes of the industry, but has put out an impressive number of films that attest to his ability to craft intelligent low budget features while enticing gifted thesps to collaborate: Twister, Nadja, Hamlet, The Eternal and Experimenter are all testaments to his craft and vision. Marjorie Prime expands on the psychological concerns of Experimenter. Harrison's play presents a future where holographic representations of loved ones exist as companions to the bereaved. Almereyda seizes upon the dialogues between humans and replicants to conjure the encounters as therapy sessions in which grief and memory are twisted by the living for their own ends. As in Experimenter, Almereyda captures an endless chain of self-deceit where memories are faulty facsimiles of the past.

Almereyda's cast all deliver first rate performances. Geena Davis and Tim Robbins, both working sparingly these days, are wonderful as a bourgeoise couple whose placid facades crumble as they care for an aging parent. Jon Hamm nails the slick artifice of a replicant impersonating a long dead mate. Lois Smith, who originated the role onstage and was so good in Lady Bird, delivers a tour de force as a woman struggling with Alzheimer's disease. She and Almereyda avoid the trap of making mental deterioration cute. It is a powerful performance, all the more so with Smith essaying a replicant version of her character later in the film. 

Almereyda barely attempts to open up the play, but does so to devastating effect. The shots of natural beauty, the vastness of the ocean, flowers swaying in the wind, a rain storm, contrasts superbly with the claustrophobia of the interior sequences where the characters flail at coming to terms with the past. Almereyda also cunningly uses snippets of video, shots from My Best Friend's Wedding and a Christo installation in Central Park, to illustrate memory as an unreliable palimpsest. Almereyda's unsparing vision will bring him little acclaim or riches, but Marjorie Prime shows what wonders he can fashion with fine actors and a solid script.