The Wounded Birds of ‘Memory’

Michel Franco’s Memory begins with a group of addicts sitting in the round discussing their efforts to stay sober and sane. It’s shot in a way that doesn’t feel like a movie at all. The moment is more like standing just outside their circle of chairs and wondering if you’re supposed to be there. It’s that intimate. It’s almost a shock when Jessica Chastain, free of makeup and completely believable from second one, begins to speak. Not because you’re suddenly taking in a movie star, but because you don’t feel like you are at all.

Chastain plays Sylvia, a caregiver at a facility for adults with acute mental health issues. As we learn from the start, Sylvia has issues of her own, and maintaining her sobriety is just one of them. Being an overprotective single mother of a tween (played by the preternaturally talented Brooke Timber) is another—an issue that becomes all the more understandable as the movie carries forward.

Talked into going to a pretty grim high school reunion by her sister Olivia (a terrific Merritt Wever) an uninvited man sits down next to her. Sylvia, whose core issues are hinted at when we learn she requested a female repair person to address the leak under her refrigerator, leaves the party almost immediately. The man follows her all the way home, and Sylvia, who has made her humble apartment into a mini-fortress with an alarm code and multiple door locks, loses her stoicism as soon as she gets on the other side of her door.

From her walk up, she can still see the man standing outside her door below, but when she finds him there the next morning sleeping under a trash bag, she realizes something greater is amiss. After sorting through his ID and phone, she calls the man’s brother, who is grateful in a “this has happened before” kind of way. As it turns out, the man, Saul (an impeccable Peter Saarsgard) is suffering from early onset dementia. The man picking him up is his brother, Isaac, (the always welcome Josh Charles).

When Sylvia follows up to check on Saul later, we believe it’s out of kindness, but Sylvia thinks she recognizes him as someone who took part in doing her harm when she was a child. It would be inappropriate to share any more, but suffice it to say, Memory isn’t only about Saul’s loss of much of his, but also about Sylvia’s inability to forget, and at least on this occasion regarding Saul, to remember specifically.

When Isaac learns that Sylvia is a caregiver to adults with mental illness, he quickly extends her a job offer to spend time with Saul, which at first seems like a good turn of events for all of them. Sylvia can make some extra money, Saul will have someone to look after him whose company he enjoys, and Isaac can feel free to go into work and take meetings in person.

If I’m making Memory sound like an inspirational drama, let me disabuse you of that notion. Franco’s film is much more complex than any basic synopsis could properly describe. Especially when Sylvia and Saul begin to have romantic feelings for one another. She sees him as safe, and he sees her as someone who views him as a person in full, not just someone who needs extensive assistance.

The romance is not a simple one. When Saul leaves home to move in with Sylvia, Isaac tells him that he doesn’t know what he’s setting himself up for. He could just as easily have said the same to Sylvia.

Both Sylvia and Saul are frozen by related, but somewhat opposing, afflictions. Saul is tormented by an inability to retain memories, whereas Sylvia is tormented by that which she cannot forget. There is a lovely scene where the two go to a restaurant that Saul frequents. He can recall that the food is good, but when the waitress asks him if he’d like his “usual” he says yes, even though he can’t remember the waitress or the usual. He and Sylvia have the kind of laugh over his dementia that only two people who are on the same wavelength can have. At the same time, that relatively light moment foreshadows the darkness to come. We know Saul’s dementia isn’t going to get better, or remain static. It is going to progress. And when it does, the consequences will be significant.

In the most harrowing scene in the film, Sylvia confronts her estranged mother and sister over a childhood trauma that her mother denies. The scene is largely shot from a distance, and you often can’t see Chastain’s face easily. In showcasing the scene this way, Franco once again makes you a captive bystander of a moment that you can’t look away from, even though you might wish that you could.

As Sylvia takes her mother to task, recounting what happened to her in her youth, we see Olivia stiffen, extend her arm, and hold out her hand as if trying to press down on a boiling pot that is spilling over the brim (Wever is extraordinary in this moment), and when the truth is finally expressed, and Sylvia explodes on her mother (and to a degree, her sister) in front of her brother-in-law and her own daughter, the impact is devastating.

It’s easy to think of Chastain as a warm presence, both on film and off, but her capacity to access the darkest places, as in Zero Dark Thirty or Scenes From a Marriage, has always been astounding. And never more so than here, in Memory. Sylvia is among her finest creations, one that proves, yet again, that Chastain is one of our greatest actors.

In the case of Saarsgard, who has consistently been exceptional for so long (lack of an Oscar nomination be damned), his Saul may well be the role of his life. The degree of difficulty Saarsgard is working at here is towering. One wrong step, one overly convenient line reading, and the entire film would fall apart. But Saarsgard never steps wrong. His portrayal of Saul’s sadness, frustration, and, most notably, his charm is so pinpoint and precise while seemingly effortless that one can’t help but completely accept him and therefore, the film.

As Memory was coming to a tenuous close, I became aware that my hand, perhaps for some time, was covering my mouth. The way one does when what they see before them fills them with a mixture of dread, anticipation, and a sliver of hope. Memory is a very human drama that feels like a thriller—there is so much at stake in these fragile lives. I haven’t felt so much trepidation in a film’s final moments since first seeing Barry Jenkins’ masterpiece, Moonlight. I can think of no higher praise.

Throughout the film, the song “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum can be heard. It’s a song that Saul can remember. So he and the film return to it liberally and effectively. But as I was watching Memory, a different song kept coming to my mind—“Wounded Bird” by the long forgotten R&B duo, Charles & Eddie. I couldn’t get their lyrics out of my head during the back half of the film: