Like a karst river, the noir genre has often had to sink into cinematographic practices, overwhelmed by more à la page ways and styles, only to suddenly return to the surface, when you least expect it, with its charge of truth and expressive force still intact. As happened with Michael Keaton, director, debuting sixteen years ago with The Merry Gentleman (unpublished by us) and now author of a noir outside the box, The Memory of the Assassin, but not out of time. In between, the actor Michael Keaton has strung together success after success – let’s remember at least Birdman (which earned him a nomination), Spotlight Case, The Trial of the Chicago 7 – but evidently the desire to measure himself against something more personal had not abandoned him and he found it in Gregory Poirier’s screenplay and in the charm that noir can still express.
John Knox, who his friends call Aristotle because of his passion for books (Michael Keaton), doesn’t have the best job in the world.: is a contract killer who has built a reputation for the meticulousness and attention to detail with which he carries out his jobs. If he ended up in prison once, it was for tax evasion and certainly not for one of his assignments, which he often carries out with his colleague Thomas (Ray McKinnon). And with him we see him discussing the next contract, to be carried out after John has taken a couple of days of “vacation”. This is how he justifies himself to his friend so as not to reveal the true purpose of his trip: to be examined by a famous neurologist, who will reveal – to him and to the audience – what he suffers from: Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, the cause of a cognitive dementia that progresses faster than Alzheimer’s. The response is merciless: the time he has left before losing his lucidity is measured in weeks, not months, and from this moment on the film will mark the progression by emphasizing the passing of those weeks.
But the first effects are not long in making themselves felt, and the direction shows them to us by resorting to one of the classic noir stylistic devices, that fading of the image towards black. and the silence that can restore the sudden visual and auditory solitude. The one who will pay the consequences will be Thomas himself, in the last assignment that John has to complete, where instead of just one person he will end up killing three (the target, his occasional companion and his friend). Experience allows him to sort things out more or less, even if the tough detective Emily Ikari (Suzy Nakamura) senses that things went differently than the evidence would indicate. But to complicate things, John’s son Miles (James Marsden), with whom he had severed ties for many years, knocks on the house: in a fit of rage he killed the man who had seduced and impregnated his sixteen-year-old daughter and now, bloodied and shocked, he has decided to ask his father (whose activity he knows very well) for help. And as time passes and the gaps become more frequent, Knox can only turn to his client Xavier (Al Pacino), to try to solve the many problems that are piling up, not least the greed of the prostitute (Joanna Kulig) who came by every week to provide her services.
Of course, we are no longer in the 1940s, when noir became the most popular and beloved genre. because he knew how to give form on the screen to the doubts and fears of a generation that had suffered the trauma of war and had fallen prey to an existential malaise without a solution. Keaton and his screenwriter Poirier, however, have not forgotten that lesson and bring it to a more nuanced and complex way of telling, far from the serial linearity in vogue today: it is not the twists that make the difference (here there will be only one, decisive, but at the end of the film) but rather the reflection on the morality of certain choices. And then the tiredness of these non-heroes, the need to complete their “work” like true professionals and, in the end, the strength of a father-son bond that time and resentment have not erased.
