Rowan Joffé
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Joffe wisely doesn't ape Christopher Nolan's approach in the brilliantly executed Memento (to do so would have invited unfavorable comparisons) but his sure-handed (albeit conventional) approach to the material only goes far enough to make the setup compelling.
Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth and Mark Strong add value to this British psychological thriller with faint echoes of Memento in that its heroine suffers from a perilous case of amnesia.
In a twist that will probably have any neuropsychiatrists in the audience tsk-tsking to themselves, this already "atypical" case of anterograde amnesia — the kind that inspired Christopher Nolan's brilliant "Memento" as well as the brain-dead rom-com "50 First Dates" — also erased years of her life from before the accident, including her marriage.
Let’s say it can, and let’s even say that it’s not really a problem that this is a sloppy ripoff of “Memento.”
A shameless, mostly sanitized rip-off of better genre offerings like Memento and Diabolically Yours, Before I Go To Sleep imagines, soap-opera-style, that simply thinking really hard and occasionally being jolted by gruesome pictures can reverse rare forms of amnesia.
From the stylish mysteries of Hitchcock's Spellbound to the art-house thrills of Memento , the horrors of Angel Heart, the sci-fi experiments of Total Recall , the tragicomic heartbreak of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , and even the goofy romance of 50 First Dates , memory – or the lack of it – has provided a nifty plot device for a dazzling array of cinematic crowd-pleasers.
The 2004 romantic-comedy “50 First Dates” plunged into this very theme, yet obviously that film was meant to emphasize how cute and romantic this situation could be.
In a twist that will probably have any neuropsychiatrists in the audience tsk-tsking to themselves, this already "atypical" case of anterograde amnesia — the kind that inspired Christopher Nolan's brilliant "Memento" as well as the brain-dead rom-com "50 First Dates" — also erased years of her life from before the accident, including her marriage.
From the stylish mysteries of Hitchcock's Spellbound to the art-house thrills of Memento , the horrors of Angel Heart, the sci-fi experiments of Total Recall , the tragicomic heartbreak of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , and even the goofy romance of 50 First Dates , memory – or the lack of it – has provided a nifty plot device for a dazzling array of cinematic crowd-pleasers.
Since we’re not that lucky, the film’s rancidness lingers, especially when you start comparing it to similarly themed flicks like “Memento” and “50 First Dates.”
The 10-year-old comedy 50 First Dates is notable for only two reasons: it was the last time Adam Sandler was arguably funny, and it was the first time anyone made up this particularly stupid form of amnesia, in which the subject loses their memory every time they fall asleep.
The story, I do not know if it is faithful to the novel or not, is merely a dramatic “50 First Dates” with lots of twists – not many believable – that propel the film to its confrontational conclusion.
From the stylish mysteries of Hitchcock's Spellbound to the art-house thrills of Memento , the horrors of Angel Heart, the sci-fi experiments of Total Recall , the tragicomic heartbreak of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , and even the goofy romance of 50 First Dates , memory – or the lack of it – has provided a nifty plot device for a dazzling array of cinematic crowd-pleasers.
Hitchcock seized on it for his classic Spellbound and 55 years later Christopher Nolan fashioned a cinematic jigsaw around it in Memento.
As the film became ever more numbingly alienating, not to mention enervating, my thoughts turned towards the 1945 gothic romance Love Letters, which also used amnesia as its theme.
But in addition to Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight,” one can recall actresses as different as Barbara Stanwyck and Doris Day involved in such claptrap, the former in “Sorry, Wrong Number” and the latter twice, in “Julie” and “Midnight Lace.”
That's not just because the film's amnesia conceit has been used before in such varied pictures as "Memento," "Clean Slate," "50 First Dates" and "The Bourne Identity."
There’s also a little of the Dana Carvey movie “Clean Slate” and the serious, superlative “Memento” here.
Imagine Groundhog Day without any of the good bits.
The plot conceit, in which Christine forgets each day’s events as soon as she goes to sleep, has a vague resemblance to “Groundhog Day.”
A sort of inside-out “Groundhog Day” crossed with “Memento,” the thriller “Before I Go to Sleep” begins with an intriguing, if very movie-ish, premise: A woman (Nicole Kidman) wakes up each morning having no memory of recent days or even years.
Imagine Groundhog Day meets Memento, with a jot of 50 First Dates and then take out anything remotely intriguing, suspenseful or funny.
But in addition to Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight,” one can recall actresses as different as Barbara Stanwyck and Doris Day involved in such claptrap, the former in “Sorry, Wrong Number” and the latter twice, in “Julie” and “Midnight Lace.”
Yet the footage that kept unspooling in my own forgetful mind was from Wolfgang Petersen's Shattered , an underrated adaption of Richard Neely's novel, which draws heavily on the "amnesia noir" flicks of the 40s, and closely prefigures the enjoyable twists and turns of Before I Go to Sleep .
This sort of helpless damsel-in-distress stuff has been done to death over the years, with Hitchcock alone using it as a vehicle for both Joan Fontaine in “Suspicion” and Grace Kelly in “Dial M for Murder.”
It’s cliché to say something like that, and Before I Go to Sleep is no The 39 Steps, but I appreciated how British the film was and how determined it was to keep the drama and the thrills at a very human level.
Dial M for Murder (1954)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced Before I Go to Sleep (2014)
Characters
This sort of helpless damsel-in-distress stuff has been done to death over the years, with Hitchcock alone using it as a vehicle for both Joan Fontaine in “Suspicion” and Grace Kelly in “Dial M for Murder.”
Requiring a stunning degree of specificity and assembled with hyper-elegance by editors Jonathan Amos & Paul Machliss, it's breathtaking to watch everything from a one-shot coffee run choreographed to Bob & Earl's "Harlem Shuffle," to a final showdown set to Queen's "Brighton Rock."
There also seems to be a few deliberate nods to many of Wright’s earlier films, whether it’s the trademark close-ups whenever Baby revs up his car, the use of Queen’s “Brighton Rock”—Queen was used in Shaun of the Dead, Too—not to mention the use of Beck’s “Debra” being that Beck wrote the song “Ramona” for Scott Pilgrim.
Stacks of money hit the table and car doors slam to the beat of various tunes, The Damned’s Neat Neat Neat powers a phenomenal police pursuit through the ATL that’ll get your heart racing, and Baby faces the music (metaphorically speaking) as his “killer” song, Queen’s Brighton Rock, plays on.
As the chases get more violent, so does the music, with cuts from The Damned, and one of Queen’s most explosive anthems, “Brighton Rock.”
Everyone has a song that psyches them up (“Brighton Rock,” for example), and that’s what Baby Driver‘s entire playlist feels like.
(Of course, it’s a subtext to “Vertigo” as well.)
Imagine if at the end of Psycho, Norman Bates' mom turned out to be a sweet old lady innocently rocking in her chair.
From the stylish mysteries of Hitchcock's Spellbound to the art-house thrills of Memento , the horrors of Angel Heart, the sci-fi experiments of Total Recall , the tragicomic heartbreak of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , and even the goofy romance of 50 First Dates , memory – or the lack of it – has provided a nifty plot device for a dazzling array of cinematic crowd-pleasers.
My Name Is Julia Ross (1945)
Directed by Joseph H. Lewis
influenced Before I Go to Sleep (2014)
Themes
Less a cut-rate Gone Girl than a throwback to gothic, mid-1940s women’s noirs like My Name Is Julia Ross, the movie mines common domestic fears—the spouse as stranger, the home as prison—while turning the viewer’s susceptibility to twists into a plot device.
Kidman’s done major films, but her brightest spots have been in indies like “Birth,” “Fur” and “Margot at the Wedding.”
It's reminiscent of her work in Jonathan Glazer's Birth, commercially unreleased here but well worth hunting down, and a reminder she is, in the right project, an actor of breadth and depth.
There’s not the same nuance here that she displayed in, say, The Others or Birth, roles which are in the same roomy wheelhouse as this one, but then again despite the fact that she’s the story’s anchoring consciousness the script doesn’t flesh actually out her character all that much.
(Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 2007's "The Lookout" was a much smarter movie involving a traumatic brain injury.)
Joffe (son of “The Killing Fields”’s Roland, and the director of 2011’s so-so take on “Brighton Rock”) is a better director than writer, his tight cinemascope frames getting so close to Kidman that they seem to trap her more than she already is.