Mr. Nobody

Year 15, Day 79 - 3/20/23 - Movie #4,380

BEFORE: Sarah Polley carries over from "The Weight of Water", and today my worlds are colliding - my boss at one job is screening a rough cut of his new film at my other job, the theater where I work part time.  So I'm there today not as an employee, but working for a guest appearing at an event, screening a film during a class.  Well, at least they know me there.  

It's Day 20 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Backstage Musicals" (before 8 pm) and "Silents" (8 pm and after).  I may do well on the first topic, but probably not on the second.  Here's the line-up: 

6:15 am "The Broadway Melody of 1936" (1936)

8:00 am "Gold Diggers of 1937" (1936)

10:00 am "42nd Street" (1933)

11:45 am "Easter Parade" (1948)

1:30 pm "Kiss Me Kate" (1953)

3:30 pm "The Band Wagon" (1953)

5:30 pm "Gypsy" (1962)

8:00 pm "Sunrise" (1927)

9:45 pm "The Last Command" (1928)

11:30 pm "The Circus" (1928)

1:00 am ""The Crowd" (1928)

2:45 am "White Shadows in the South Seas" (1928)

4:30 am "Speedy" (1928)

I still haven't seen "42nd Street"?  How did that one slip by me?  I have seen "Easter Parade"< "Kiss Me Kate", "The Band Wagon" and "Gypsy" - that gives me 4 out of 13 today, and brings me to 104 seen overall out of 228, so down a bit to 45.6%.  

THE PLOT: Nemo Nobody, the last mortal human, is recounting his life story to a reporter.  He's less than clear, often thinking that his is only 34 years old instead of 118, but his story becomes even more confusing as he tells it. 

AFTER: One of my favorite books (and movies) of all time is Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", it blew me away when I was a teenager, as the ultimate time-travel story without employing a time machine. In that famous story, Billy Pilgrim served in World War II, had a family when he returned home and much later in life, was abducted by aliens to live in an outer-space zoo.  But the aliens taught him to time-travel within his own lifetime, so the book presents stories from different parts of his life out of order, presumably because he's jumping through his own life as he remembers it.  That's ONE possible explanation for what's seen happening in "Mr. Nobody", only it couldn't be the whole story.  This is more like "Slaughterhouse Five" mixed with the ending of "2001: A Space Odyssey", with bits of "Sliding Doors" and "Cloud Atlas" thrown into the mix, and maybe coming a bit close to the multiverse of "Everything Everywhere All at Once"?  

But the movie never mentions the multiverse outright - I guess that didn't catch on until people realized they could have more versions of Spider-Man team up once you envision the mulitverse.  However, the lead character, Nemo, takes time to speak to the audience about how there was nothing before the Big Bang, how the universe is made up of ten dimensions but we can only experience four of them, and what happens when the universe gets as big as it can get?  One theory is the universe is infinite, and will just keep on expanding forever, but another theory is that at some point it will stop expanding and start shrinking, and we really don't know at that point if time will continue to move forward or if it will suddenly reverse and go backwards.  Which is going to be weird for everybody who will have to un-die and live their life again, but Benjamin Button-style, and we'll all have to go through high school again but in reverse, and then eventually get very small and go back inside our mother's wombs.  Awkward. 

Vonnegut kept his time-traveling character confined to just one life, but here there are no constraints, Nemo is able to experience several different lifetimes, he has several different wives and sometimes has children with them, depending on the timeline.  And somehow as an old man of age 118, he remembers all of the timelines, even though he could only have experienced one of them.  Did he travel to Mars?  Did he drown in a lake?  Did he exist in heaven as a soul who got to pick his parents and also remember his time in heaven?  Yes, yes, and yes.  Also, no.

The supposed divergent point is when his parents split up, and Nemo can only live with one of them - he chases after his mother's train and in one timeline he catches up with the train and lives with his mum in Montreal, in the other he can't catch the train and lives with dad in England.  But it's also suggested that the boy can't really ever decide between his parents, because he loved them equally, so the whole movie is him looking into the future to try to determine the best course of action, and this takes so long he never really gets around to making that choice.  This is a common theme here, indecision is so terrible that it's better to not make any choice at all, however, I counter this with the lyrics of Rush's "Freewill": "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."  

It might also be possible that Nemo knew three young girls when he was 9 years old, and the timelines depict him marrying each one of them - and by this point I couldn't tell whether it was the SAME Nemo marrying each woman, or if it was three different Nemos who each married one woman.  I suppose it doesn't matter, except that it also kind of does. One breakdown of the timelines suggests that the Nemo who lived with his mother fell in love with Anna (even though she was his step-sister - I didn't want to bring this up, but "incest" is an accidental theme this week, this is the third film to use it as a plot point...).  By this logic, the Nemo who chose to live with his father married Elise, and then when that didn't work out, he married Jean.  

The Nemos that die, for one reason or another, awake in some kind of surreal limbo environment which contains a broken-down house, and within that house is a TV set and DVD player, with a message for the dead Nemo from the 118-year old Nemo, who has found a way to contact his past selves and instruct them that they are now in a universe where Nemo Nobody was never born, and that the alive old Nemo will die on February 12, 2092.  Man, old Nemo is really nasty, he contacts his dead multiverse counterparts and really rubs it in their faces.  Umm, I think. 

The other option here is that the 118-year old Nemo Nobody (because he's apparently forgotten his own last name over time...) has dementia, and is unable to remember his past clearly, and so the reality he lived is just as real to him as the realities that he did NOT live - and hey, there are probably a lot more of those.  Memory is a fickle thing, and we've all probably forgotten more details of our lives than we remember, but for the seniors, whoo boy, a lot of them can't even remember what they had for lunch today.  But why, if humanity has essentially conquered death by constantly renewing people's cells and organs, can't they work this magic on Nemo?  Is he too old, or somehow immune to the process?  Please explain.  

It's a moot point, because just as our weary centenarian-plus finishes telling the reporter his story, he reveals that neither of them are real, that they're both just parts of the imagination of that 9-year old boy standing on the train platform, trying to make a decision.  Umm, sorry, but I'm not buying it - no 9-year old would ever imagine himself as being 118 years old, when you're only 9 you just want to be 10, or 16, or maybe 21.  But beyond that, a 9-year old just really can't grasp what it means to be in his thirties, let alone 118.  

Nemo has even calculated the moment of his own death, but wouldn't you know it, just before he gets to it, the universe stops expanding and starts to contract again - umm, I think, it's a bit tough to be sure.  But this means that the flow of time is about to reverse, old Nemo's going to start getting young again, and the dead are going to come back to life, and he's going to live his life (lives?) all over again, but backwards (and in high heels?)

So yeah, this is a particularly weird movie, which incorporates the theories of the Butterfly Effect, chaos theory, the subjective nature of time, our warped perceptions of our own back-stories, and ends up pointing out that making any choice is a double-edged sword. A simple choice can change your life, because it makes one thing possible and everything else not possible.  And as long as you don't choose, everything remains possible. For a while, at least.  And if you were able to determine the outcome of a particular choice, would you still choose it, or would you opt for the future that you can't see? Your answer to this question probably says a lot about you - or maybe not, because given enough time, any one particular choice has very little significance. 

Also starring Jared Leto (last seen in "Morbius"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "The Operative"), Linh-Dan Pham, Rhys Ifans (last seen in "The King's Man"), Natasha Little (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Daniel Mays (ditto), Toby Regbo (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Juno Temple (last seen in "Horns"), Clare Stone (last seen in "Breach"), Thomas Byrne, Audrey Giacomini, Laura Brumagne, Allan Corduner (last seen in "Operation Finale"), Michael Riley, Ben Mansfield, Laurent Capelluto, Jaco Van Dormael, Pascal Duquenne, Emily Tilson, Roline Skehan, Anders Morris, Nathan Boydell, Vincent Dupont, Marc Zinga (last seen in "Spectre"), Martin Swabey, Lea Thonus, Anais Van Belle, Leni Parker, Daniel Brochu (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Louise Sophia Engel, Aaron Landt.

RATING: 5 out of 10 face tattoos (they're going to be VERY popular by the end of the 21st century...)