Backlash against flashbacks

It used to be that flashbacks obliged a filmmaker to think creatively. There’s our hero, for most of the running time pushing 50, but as we vault into the past, they’re transformed into a slim and cherubic 25: how might the director de-age him?

The same actor, makeup-caked and sprightly, could don a period wig and an out-of-date moustache. A younger man, of passable resemblance to our elder lead, might step in as age-appropriate substitute. Or else our hero may simply go about his business in the past unaltered: that’s suspension of disbelief for you.

But of course Hollywood is incapable of leaving very much of anything well enough alone, and these days any director who so wishes can metamorphose his leading man into a moppet half his age, creative thinking be damned.

Thus in flashback we’re no longer resigned to endure the ersatz burlesque of a freshfaced surrogate or the unpersuasive cosmetics-blasted face of a nearly elder fraud. We’re free to enjoy an actor’s youthful looks in all their computer-enhanced glory — the pristine facade of a state-ofthe-art visage. The gimmick’s grand introduction was way back in the summer of 2006, if I remember correctly, when the eminently tasteful Brett Ratner plunged Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen into his ultramodern fountain of youth for a short scene at the beginning of X-Men 3. That, we all seemed to agree, was utterly ridiculous: Stewart and McKellen didn’t so much look like younger versions of themselves as models marked for recall at Madame Tussauds. Not that the intervening decade of evolution in computer graphics has made the effect any more credible.

The time warp flashback face made another prominent appearance this past week, in HBO’s much-discussed and super-glossy Westworld: 78-year-old Anthony Hopkins was momentarily transformed into a man of 35 when the show whisked us back to the frontier of robot theme park engineering.

Would a younger actor have disrupted the elegance of the show’s design? Would Hopkins himself in a wig have broken the illusion? If it’s verisimilitude you want, it seems to me, what’s worked for a century is surely better than a novelty, still half-baked