Don't You Forget About Me
Malcolm & Marie quickly fades from memory, while Little Fish leaves an impression.
●●○○
We’ve all known one of those couples. Every fight threatens to be their last, and after a while we think it probably should be. Hesitant to answer honestly when asked what we think of this latest blowup, we know from experience that they’re loath to listen to good advice; eventually, there’s little more to do than stop getting involved and decide that they deserve each other. If witnessing one of these potentially relationship-ending arguments play out in excruciating detail doesn’t sound like the making of a compelling movie, that’s because it isn’t.
Everything that happens in Malcolm & Marie stems from a single mistake: a filmmaker (John David Washington) forgets to thank his girlfriend (Zendaya) at the premiere of his first movie. Taking place largely in real time over the course of one night, the film examines the fallout of that seemingly small oversight — a clever conceit, but one that isn’t fully realized. Written and directed by Sam Levinson, who created Euphoria (for which Zendaya recently won a well-deserved Emmy), the film is one of those unfortunate less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts misfires.
It’s also a victim of circumstance. Malcolm & Marie was made entirely during the pandemic, which is evident from the fact that it consists of little more than its two leads arguing in a single location as well as the fact that it ultimately isn’t very good. With its black-and-white cinematography and verbal blowups, much of the movie plays out like John Cassavetes worship. There are few more worthy of reverence, but the thing about Cassavetes is that none of his imitators ever come close to replicating what made him so brilliant — if someone else could have made another Minnie and Moskowitz, they probably would have done it by now.
Say this for Levinson, though: he isn’t afraid of alienating viewers who aren’t as keyed into this world as he is. Namedropping outlets like Variety and IndieWire in one scene and discussing the vagaries of movie premieres in the next, the script eventually doubles down on the couple’s increasingly mean-spirited put-downs as their argument escalates throughout the night. Mediating or even simply witnessing a fight between friends is unpleasant enough, but because Malcolm and Marie never feel like more than a vessel for Levinson’s self-indulgence there’s little reason to care whether their relationship lives to see the next argument.
●●●○
A woman in a marathon who forgets to stop running, a fisherman who can’t remember how to steer his boat, a pilot who forgets how to fly — these are the first stories we hear of the affliction at the center of Little Fish. Those affected are unnamed and far away at first, the “other people” these things usually happen to, but Chad Hartigan’s romantic drama arrives at a time when we’ve all learned the hard way that, sooner or later, we’re those other people.
Turns out it’s sooner. Jude (Jack O’Connell) forgets a conversation he and his wife Emma (Olivia Cooke) had less than an hour earlier about adopting a dog — an ongoing discussion, as part of her job at a veterinarian’s office entails euthanizing strays and she wishes she could save all of them. (Don’t we all?) She knows instantly that he must have NIA, or neuro-inflammatory affliction, a kind of amnesia spreading at an alarming rate. (If this sounds like a bit much during an actual pandemic, it’s hardly the film’s fault: Little Fish was supposed to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival nearly a year ago, an event that was postponed due for obvious reasons.)
Hartigan wrote and directed his first two features, the similarly low-key This Is Martin Bonner and Morris From America, whereas this time he’s directing from a script by Mattson Tomlin (an uncredited writer on The Batman). Though reminiscent of everything from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Perfect Sense to last year’s Apples, their collaboration doesn’t feel as derivative as it might sound — Emma and Jude’s love may not conquer all, but unlike in Malcolm & Marie we desperately want it to.
Eventually we begin to see Jude’s memories as he now recalls them: fragmented and incomplete, more like a vivid dream than an accurate recounting of real, lived events. A particularly affecting scene finds him telling her about their wedding day for minutes on end as a kind of test, correcting details as he realizes they’re slightly off, only for her to gently tell him that he got the entire thing wrong. Every day is a little worse than the day before, yet better than it’ll ever be again. Even someone with the memory of a goldfish can tell you how tragic that is.