Review: In ‘Memory,’ two survivors come to a wary bond, even if the past harbors demons

A guarded Jessica Chastain and a rumpled Peter Sarsgaard make mysterious, sweetly dissonant music together in “Memory,” a touch-and-go drama about connection that’s as steeped in discomfort as it is cautiously hopeful about one’s ability to find peace within it.

Writer-director Michel Franco’s take on an offbeat urban romance — between a social worker and a cognitively impaired, housebound man — has no use for easy or overwrought emotions or snap conclusions. Franco’s story implies that to really see someone on the inside is hard work. And doing so when nobody around you trusts your eyesight, much less your judgment? Even harder.

When we meet Chastain’s Sylvia, she’s the back of a head in a darkly lighted AA meeting. Members heap praise on her for how she’s handled her struggle across 13 years of sobriety, a span of time that corresponds to the age of her daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber), also in tow.

In the outside world, where she works in adult day care and lives in a tightly secured apartment, Sylvia’s manner is hard-edged and solitary — and when it comes to Anna, who enjoys hanging out with her aunt Olivia (Merritt Wever) and same-age cousins, as watchful as a hawk. Silvia looks ill at ease around her extended family, or is it just anyone who’s not her daughter?

Her unease palpably becomes ours, though, when she’s followed home from her high school reunion by a shaggy-looking attendee who then camps outside her building overnight in the pouring rain. Gentle-seeming but clearly not well, Saul (Sarsgaard) is picked up the next morning by his brother Isaac (Josh Charles), which is when we learn that the former suffers from dementia and lives unsupervised in his brownstone, occasionally looked after by Isaac and an adoring niece (Elsie Fisher).

Awards

Healing, connection, optimism’: Peter Sarsgaard takes ‘Memory’ beyond the dementia

“I find it so gratifying that people are emotional watching this. They have a feeling of unity and optimism,” the actor says.

Dec. 20, 2023

Sylvia, however, is convinced that smiling, polite Saul is actually a figure from her traumatic childhood who recognized her that night. When she initiates a follow-up visit, the gesture appears charitable but comes with a pent-up confrontation in mind. In its clarifying wake, however, a tenderness develops between these damaged souls, one that becomes increasingly difficult to understand for their respective families — including the mother Sylvia won’t speak to, for reasons that become disturbingly clear as things combust in the final act. (Even before we know what we suspect, Jessica Harper’s few scenes vividly suggest a manipulative affluence worth purging.)

Franco is a cool-headed ironist with a flair for oblique narrative and a fascination with the detached worlds of the wealthy. In taut, violent oddities of disintegration like “New Order” and “Sundown,” his style can translate into a bracing, compelling distance that’s not for all tastes. But because “Memory” is, at root, a story of people finding each other, the vibe is more reminiscent of Franco’s caretaking character study “Chronic,” while still touching on the abiding peculiarities of people who come from money and what’s always simmering in broken people. More directly than his previous films, his penchant for long takes with minimal intercutting seeds an emotional suspense, for us as well as the fragile humans inside cinematographer Yves Cape’s cool, steady frame.

Chastain and Sarsgaard use that time and space well too, playing out what’s unspoken and making real their characters’ budding, unsentimental closeness. There are whole areas of this twosome’s bond that remain unexplained. Ultimately, that feels like a virtue of the movie, rather than a flaw.

Franco’s way with a heartfelt story means foregrounding a feral alertness to danger to get us to appreciate the warmth its protagonists are waiting to bestow. But it’s also what’s admirably adult about “Memory.” It’s a movie that understands fully how nothing about our lives is a given, and that if you look hard enough at yours, there’s always something worth escaping from and running toward.