Mr. Nobody (2009)

A 117-year-old man contemplates his life’s choices and recalls fragments of his many possible pasts, partly to a doctor who looks like an albino version of Darth Maul and partly to a immortal journalist who sneaks in to interview the world’s oldest (and last mortal) man. His name is Nemo Nobody and it’s 2092.

I need to preface this post by saying that I set out in 2011 to shorten my often long-winded reviews and come to the point more quickly…. only to stumble upon this confounding beast before the first week of the new year was out. Sorry, but Mr. Nobody just won’t fit into a capsule review. Its themes and scope are just too big to stuff into two or three paragraphs. The only short reviews I could find online where from critics who simply wrote the film off. Even if they’re right (and they may be), Mr. Nobody is an ambitious and far-reaching project that both invites and deserves further analysis and discussion.

Two decades ago, Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael arrived on the international film scene with a bang. His first feature-length film, the whimsical Toto le héros (1991), garnered a dozen or so European festival awards and was well-received at Cannes that year, winning a couple of Golden Cucumbers or whatever they call them. Toto’s huge success turned Van Dormael into a bit of an overnight celebrity in cineste circles, despite the fact the he had a healthy reputation in the world of short films tracing back to the late ’70s. It would be 5 years before the release of his next feature, The Eighth Day in 1996 and an even longer 13 year wait for his third, Mr. Nobody in 2009. I can find no mention online of what Van Dormael did in the intervening years, but I’ll bet a fair amount of it was spent writing this script.

Mr. Nobody is one of the more challenging films I’ve watched in recent years, and I think I mean that in a mostly-positive way. It reminded me of what a collaboration between Tarkovsky and Chuck Jones might have looked like. Van Dormael has created something quite extraordinary here, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. First and foremost, I’m not sure if Mr. Nobody is great or awful. It might be both… or neither. Thematically, it shares some ground with The Fountain (2006), and just as Darren Aronofsky’s film polarized audiences, critic’s and co-workers at the Buff, so too will Mr. Nobody… if anyone ever sees it that is. Secondly, the plot is nearly impossible to summarize without sounding like you’ve just taken 2 hits of acid. Mr. Nobody is billed as a science fiction, but it’s a difficult film to shoehorn into any particular genre. A Psy-Fi perhaps?

What Mr. Nobody definitely is however, is a jigsaw puzzle, more easily described by metaphor than comparison to other films. Van Dormael himself describes the film as a nested Russian doll where the viewer can get lost, finding more questions than answers in the proceedings. There are recurring elemental themes throughout, but water is central to the surreal imagery of Nemo Nobody’s half-remembered fragments of his uncertain past/pasts. The repeating chess board imagery serves to symbolize the difficult game that everyone plays with life. I had to look up what it was called, but Van Dormael seems to be evoking one of chess’s most complex moves, Zugzwang, where a player is forced to move, knowing full well that, no matter which choice he makes, he must suffer the consequences. (Between a rock and a hard place for those of us who play checkers)

The film’s structure recalls Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors (1998), a slight, but enjoyable rom-com about the two very different paths a woman’s life could take, depending on whether she boards a subway train or not. If you can imagine that plot line inverted and instead of time splitting into forward possibilities, that the old man is recalling backwards all of the possible paths that sprang from being forced to make an impossible choice when he was just 9 years old. In this regard, Mr. Nobody becomes a variation on the Buridan’s Ass paradox. With his parents splitting up, a 9-year-old Nemo must choose between leaving with his mother to a new life in America or staying with his broken, but loving father in the U.K. Either decision requires a sacrifice that the young boy, quite understandably, simply can’t make. The audience is never made aware whether writer/director Van Dormael isn’t playing the unreliable-narrator card or not. The old man’s story is fantastic and confusing, but impossible to prove or disprove.

That a film as cerebral and complex as Mr. Nobody would have difficulty finding its audience won’t come as much of a surprise, but Entertainment One sealed its fate by releasing Mr. Nobody on the same day as Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Inception hit the theatres. Without any marketing (and quite frankly, I’m not sure it would have made any difference), Mr. Nobody sank like a rock and was gone a week later. In many ways, Nolan’s Inception is just a warm up for Mr. Nobody. The two films share more than a few similarities. Like Inception, Van Dormael builds four parallel universes that communicate with each other. Space and time constantly merge into and out of these multiple time lines. The film’s visual palette also moves and changes as the different eras, lives and marriages Nemo has apparently experienced trace a decidedly non-linear path from old age back to his childhood. In some ways, Mr. Nobody is a sort of Benjamin Button re-imagined by Philip K. Dick on a bender.

Mr. Nobody stars Jared Leto in a performance that’s difficult to find fault with. His younger selves are played by equally impressive young actors, none of whom you’ll likely recognize. The supporting cast includes Sarah Polley, Diane Krugeris and Rhys Ifans, who are all excellent. The film was a Belgian production co-financed by various cultural development organizations from Belgium, Canada, France and German y. It cost an estimated $47,000,000 to make and grossed $2,331,721 in worldwide theatrical ticket sales, giving one pause to consider how fortunate we are that art films are often the product of public investment and not private funding based on expected returns on investment. In any event and by nearly any measurement, Mr. Nobody simply tanked. While still chewing on the enormity of Mr. Nobody from the night before, I sat down with a coffee and the Sunday New York Times this morning and read how the new Harry-Potter-Land theme park in Florida has to turn people away at the gates every single day because apparently we all want to be wizards. Given the Hogwarts fantasy-world so many seem drawn to, it isn’t all that hard to see why Nemo Nobody appealed to nearly nobody.

I’ve been avoiding coming to the ultimate question about Mr. Nobody… is it worth watching?… , partly because I’m still distilling the magnitude of its scope and intent, but mostly because I don’t have an answer. I don’t recall ever using the term audacious to describe a film before, but that might be the right word in this circumstance. Truth be told, Mr. Nobody might have been a little beyond me. Try as I might to wrap my head around what it had to say, I can’t quite get there. At 140 minutes, the film demands at least that again to digest and comprehend it to any degree. It instantly demands another viewing, but I’m not sure I’m up for another trip down multiple-memory lane just yet. Maybe in a week or two. At the very least, those of you who like a little cranial exercise from your cinema would do well to give it a chance. It warrants that at least.

I’m guessing that some will find it to be an unheralded modern masterpiece and others will consider it a pretentious and unwatchable piece of dreck… and it would be hard to argue with either interpretation. Regardless of whether you find Mr. Nobody engaging or trite, the fact that Van Dormael strives for something profound needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. Mr. Nobody may be a failure on any number of levels, but it certainly isn’t because they didn’t reach for greatness.

That said, I’m pretty sure we won’t be seeing a Mr. Nobody theme park on the outskirts of Brussels anytime soon.