Marjorie Prime, the latest of writer-director Michael Almereyda's experiments at the fringes of the independent American cinema, has at least one inspired idea going for it: casting Jon Hamm as an idealised image of masculinity. The whole film opens, indeed, on Hamm and an elderly woman deep in conversation at a beach house, its ocean-facing windows casting that Don Draper square jaw in an especially dreamy light. The woman, Marjorie (Lois Smith), is evidently enraptured by her companion's presence - this static extended prologue is charged, to some degree, by the sparkle in Smith's eyes - but something somewhere seems off to us, a gut feeling confirmed when Marjorie takes a step or two across the room towards this eloquent charmer, and her foot is observed to pass through his constituent pixels. The Hamm, it turns out, is a sentient hologram, composed in the image of Marjorie's late husband Walter, and purchased by her middle-aged kids (Geena Davis and Tim Robbins) to accompany their frail and lonely mother on long walks down memory lane. We join this household at a pivotal moment, with ma's condition deteriorating and the Hammgram about to be switched off - but the passage of time and successive software upgrades conspire to leave everybody on screen more reliant on technology than ever.
Thus can Almereyda's film be hooked up to those speculative currents pulsing through contemporary sci-fi: Hamm's presence recalls his participation in the Black Mirror Christmas special, and Marjorie Prime wouldn't look out of place among the episodes of the recent Philip K. Dick compendium Electric Dreams. These projects have had the good fortune to arrive among us at precisely the time when questions have started to be raised anew about the extent to which the technology in our hands and front parlours has actually made our lives easier and the world a better place. The projected lifeforms in this particular living space, brought in as companions but most often sought out as mother or father confessors, often seem like better functioning humanoids than those who've shelled out for them, in that they've been programmed specifically to listen. Yet there's nothing there, no-one to hold; they are of the coldest comfort. The source is a Jordan Harrison play, and the film retains the dimensions of theatre: fadeouts subbed in for scene breaks, framing a lot of talk about the difference between these characters' real and artificial selves. That loquacity makes this the kind of material actors habitually flock to, but it's striking just how artificial much of the talk itself is: conversations are almost always conducted in the past tense, leaving next to no sense of the world beyond the box the movie arrives in. For much of its duration, Marjorie Prime has the air of a science project, carefully conducted and recorded in a safe, sterile space so as to arrive at a neatly predestined conclusion.
The thing is, when he's not overthinking and overanalysing like crazy, Almereyda - as elsewhere in his oddbod filmography - proves very good on mood. You can fade out from the insistent yakking and tune into the rain lashing against the beachhouse shutters, or watch the snow swirling over the ocean; when the camera pauses to linger over photos of Smith - 87 years young, and new to Twitter this past month, having made her screen debut alongside James Dean in 1955's East of Eden - in her early studio-era pomp, or her and daughter Davis drifting in silent reverie while listening to "I Shall Be Released", Marjorie Prime succeeds in making the incontrovertible march of time feel newly poignant. He didn't really need Harrison for that, though, and for all the playwright's pretty words and clever-clever structuring devices - relationships that fade like memories, to be supplanted by the next - one senses the film making do with fairly standard off-Broadway material about a well-to-do dysfunctional family, not unlike the assumed audience, retreating into small huddles to work through their dependency issues. (It's Proof with an elevated electric bill.) Like many of Almereyda's 21st century ventures - up to and including 2015's very interesting Experimenter - it's almost fascinating, but also a film that suffers from cosying up so tightly to its source. A degree of conscious uncoupling - or judicious use of an extension lead - might have pushed it beyond Times Square and seen it light up the world entire.
Marjorie Prime is now playing in selected cinemas, and also available to stream online.
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