Not much memorable about ‘Nostalgia’
“Nostalgia” gets credit for being different and sincere and for trying to capture a feeling that movies don’t often deal with. The feeling is not exactly nostalgia, though it’s related to wishing for the past. The feeling is more like loss, grief and free-floating despair, the dislocation that comes from being permanently unhappy and knowing it.
The result is a movie that’s more interesting to talk about than watch, but that’s fine for our purposes, because right now we’re talking, not watching. The movie flows from one character to another, with no one person being the focus. In the first scene, we see a pregnant waitress, in close-up, and the voice of a man, off camera, asking her questions about the upcoming baby. The face of the waitress (Shinelle Azoroh) is warm and vivid, and she is filmed with such tenderness by director Mark Pellington that we settle in for a searching and sensitive movie.
That’s the last we see of the waitress. We follow the man, who turns out to be a claims adjuster ( John Ortiz), looking through the property of an old man (Bruce Dern), trying to find out if he owns anything of unexpected value. The old man is a difficult character — of course he is; he’s played by Bruce Dern — and yet somehow, not so much through the dialogue as around it, we get the sense of the man’s loneliness and his desire to reach out to this stranger.
Next stop: Ellen Burstyn, as Helen, a woman whose house has burned down — or maybe she just ate all the scenery, and it only looks like that. For a while, we wonder: Is this the deal? A claims adjuster is going to visit every octogenarian star of the 1970s? But no. The movie drops the claims adjuster and starts following Burstyn, who tears up everywhere, and every time she does, Pellington has his camera ready for a close-up. For an actress of Burstyn’s emotive proclivities, this is like a license to print money.
For more than half the movie, “Nostalgia” is about stuff. Yes, it’s also about the emotions and memories that the stuff embodies, but the emphasis is on the objects themselves, and the concern surrounding these objects begins to seem outsize. Helen, for example, has a baseball signed by Ted Williams that was the prized possession of her dead husband. And she is as boring about trying to decide whether to sell that ball as, well, anyone in real life would be who couldn’t stop talking about a ball. And crying about it.
Meanwhile, the lesson of life is that the objects don’t matter as much as we think, right? For example, did you ever leave a place where you were happy — say, a hotel room or a house where you spent a vacation — and turn around at the door to take a last look and say goodbye? But then a few years passes, or even a month, and you realize that everything you had from that room, from that structure, you still have. It doesn’t go away, because it was never really about those walls or that picture on the wall. Well, no one in “Nostalgia” seems to know this. They’re just stuck looking at stuff.
The performances are heavyhanded, except for that of Jon Hamm, who benefits not only from playing something of a wise guy (a sports memorabilia salesman), but also from his own unsentimental instincts. The long pauses, the weepiness and the dreamy introspection of the other characters are compounded by Laurent Eyquem’s score, which has a quality of suspending every scene in a thick soup of sound. We can’t get at the actors, and they can’t get to us. Maybe it’s better that way.
Still, even if it didn’t quite work out, it’s nice that somebody tried something.