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Review: In ‘Memory,’ two survivors come to a wary bond, even if the past harbors demons

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A guarded Jessica Chastain and a rumpled Peter Sarsgaard make mysterious, sweetly dissonant music together in “Memory,” a touch-and-go drama about connection that’s as steeped in discomfort as it is cautiously hopeful about one’s ability to find peace within it.

Writer-director Michel Franco’s take on an offbeat urban romance — between a social worker and a cognitively impaired, housebound man — has no use for easy or overwrought emotions or snap conclusions. Franco’s story implies that to really see someone on the inside is hard work. And doing so when nobody around you trusts your eyesight, much less your judgment? Even harder.

When we meet Chastain’s Sylvia, she’s the back of a head in a darkly lighted AA meeting. Members heap praise on her for how she’s handled her struggle across 13 years of sobriety, a span of time that corresponds to the age of her daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber), also in tow.

In the outside world, where she works in adult day care and lives in a tightly secured apartment, Sylvia’s manner is hard-edged and solitary — and when it comes to Anna, who enjoys hanging out with her aunt Olivia ( Merritt Wever ) and same-age cousins, as watchful as a hawk. Silvia looks ill at ease around her extended family, or is it just anyone who’s not her daughter?

Her unease palpably becomes ours, though, when she’s followed home from her high school reunion by a shaggy-looking attendee who then camps outside her building overnight in the pouring rain. Gentle-seeming but clearly not well, Saul (Sarsgaard) is picked up the next morning by his brother Isaac (Josh Charles), which is when we learn that the former suffers from dementia and lives unsupervised in his brownstone, occasionally looked after by Isaac and an adoring niece ( Elsie Fisher ).

Healing, connection, optimism’: Peter Sarsgaard takes ‘Memory’ beyond the dementia

“I find it so gratifying that people are emotional watching this. They have a feeling of unity and optimism,” the actor says.

Dec. 20, 2023

Sylvia, however, is convinced that smiling, polite Saul is actually a figure from her traumatic childhood who recognized her that night. When she initiates a follow-up visit, the gesture appears charitable but comes with a pent-up confrontation in mind. In its clarifying wake, however, a tenderness develops between these damaged souls, one that becomes increasingly difficult to understand for their respective families — including the mother Sylvia won’t speak to, for reasons that become disturbingly clear as things combust in the final act. (Even before we know what we suspect, Jessica Harper ’s few scenes vividly suggest a manipulative affluence worth purging.)

Franco is a cool-headed ironist with a flair for oblique narrative and a fascination with the detached worlds of the wealthy. In taut, violent oddities of disintegration like “New Order” and “Sundown,” his style can translate into a bracing, compelling distance that’s not for all tastes. But because “Memory” is, at root, a story of people finding each other, the vibe is more reminiscent of Franco’s caretaking character study “Chronic,” while still touching on the abiding peculiarities of people who come from money and what’s always simmering in broken people. More directly than his previous films, his penchant for long takes with minimal intercutting seeds an emotional suspense, for us as well as the fragile humans inside cinematographer Yves Cape’s cool, steady frame.

Chastain and Sarsgaard use that time and space well too, playing out what’s unspoken and making real their characters’ budding, unsentimental closeness. There are whole areas of this twosome’s bond that remain unexplained. Ultimately, that feels like a virtue of the movie, rather than a flaw.

Franco’s way with a heartfelt story means foregrounding a feral alertness to danger to get us to appreciate the warmth its protagonists are waiting to bestow. But it’s also what’s admirably adult about “Memory.” It’s a movie that understands fully how nothing about our lives is a given, and that if you look hard enough at yours, there’s always something worth escaping from and running toward.

Rating: R, for some sexual content, language and graphic nudity Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes Playing: AMC Century City 15

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Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard Are So Weirdly Right Together in Memory

This review was originally published on September 9. We are recirculating it now timed to Memory’ s debut in theaters.

The waning days of a film festival aren’t generally regarded as a time for great discoveries or major premieres. Much of the press has left, and those that remain have become a bit more cavalier about attending screenings; many of them are out shopping for delicate souvenirs and resilient cheeses to take home. At this year’s Venice , when star power was already notoriously hard to come by owing to the ongoing SAG-WGA strike, you could be forgiven for assuming that the party was pretty much over.

But then, here comes Memory , starring Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, one of the few films at this year’s festival allowed to have its stars attend its premiere. Appropriately so, too, because it’s almost entirely their show. Mexican director Michel Franco’s somber drama about the ghosts of the past has a lot on its mind, and not all of it makes sense. But its two leads are so good together, so weirdly right together, that everything slips away and you just watch them.

Perhaps this is all by design. Memory is such a lean work that Chastain and Sarsgaard are allowed to dominate much of the screen, even just physically. She plays Sylvia, a single mother 13 years sober who works at an adult daycare center while raising her teenage daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber). We sense her protectiveness early on with the swiftness and thoroughness she shows in locking her apartment door whenever she steps inside, with the way she watches Anna from across the street during recess at school. When someone comes to repair her fridge, Sylvia notes that she had specifically requested a woman. Chastain makes Sylvia’s simmering anxiety palpable, though in decidedly unshowy fashion. Something clearly broke in her a long time ago, and we sense that she’s spent a lot of time trying to hold it all together and move on.

One night, while attending her high school reunion, Sylvia is silently confronted by a man, Saul Shapiro (Sarsgaard). He says nothing, just sits next to her and stares. She says nothing back, just leaves. He follows her to the subway, then to her apartment. He stands outside her building, and in the morning she finds him curled up among the tires of the auto shop downstairs, shivering and incoherent. She takes his wallet and calls a number. It turns out that Saul suffers from dementia, often forgetting where he is and wandering away from the home in which he lives with his brother (Josh Charles). But Sylvia remembers Saul. In fact, she claims that he was a close friend of the boy who raped her when she was 12. What’s more, she claims that Saul also raped her once. “Do you remember what you used to make me do?” she asks him angrily the next time they meet, “or do you only remember when it’s convenient?” He stares at her blankly. He doesn’t remember a thing.

Here’s where the movie gets interestingly thorny, at least briefly. Sylvia’s sister Olivia (Merritt Wever) informs her that she is, in fact, wrong about Saul – that he started school the year she left and that he couldn’t have done the things she claims he did. This coincides with Saul’s family asking if Sylvia might be willing to help care for him during the day. She agrees, and before we know it, she and this man whom she briefly thought was a monster are suddenly spending a lot of time together. Is it something about his blankness, his gentle acceptance that attracts her? Sylvia’s daughter is getting to that age when she’s starting to rebel against her clearly overprotective mom’s edicts. And now here’s this grown man who will do anything she says, and who clearly loves just being there with her, largely because there’s nothing else he can do.

Franco’s script is so spare that we have relatively little to latch onto – almost as if the film is itself in the process of forgetting certain details. Sylvia’s accusation of Saul is barely discussed once it’s all cleared up, which seems odd for this woman to whom the past feels so resilient, so eternally corrosive. In fact, the movie turns out not to be about their common history at all, but rather their very odd, increasingly loving present.

Luckily, we have these two actors, who when together feel like a chemical reaction come to life. Her tension is transformed by his pleasant pliancy, and vice-versa. Sylvia is burdened by a swirl of memories — most of which we get only hints of — confronted by a man who can’t remember increasingly vast stretches of his life. As their relationship grows in tenderness, we pull for them, even as we sense that something horrifying might be around the corner.

The film is on less firm ground when it actually tries to untangle Sylvia’s past. The inevitable revelations about what happened to her are fairly predictable, though no less harrowing for being so. It does feel at times like Franco wants to resolve these elements quickly and get on with the rest of his movie. There’s a climactic scene in which Sylvia confronts her family that’s riveting in the moment because it’s so well-acted, but its impact dissolves the second you start to think further about it. Even so, this is clearly a film that’s meant to be carried by its leads. And as a showcase for these stars, Memory works superbly.

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Now that Nicolas Cage has had his stock upgraded as of late (thanks to his lovely performance in “Pig” and his self-aware turn in the recent “ The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent ”), and Bruce Willis has retired, I suspect that Liam Neeson is going to be the next actor who finds himself in the critical crosshairs for doing far too many forgettable movies. His latest, “Memory,” is already his second such film in 2022, and since his list of upcoming projects on IMDb mentions titles like “Retribution,” “In the Land of Saints and Sinners,” “The Revenger” and “Cold Pursuit Sequel Project,” it doesn’t appear that he will be disembarking this particular gravy train anytime soon. To his credit, “Memory” is at least slightly more ambitious than most of the similar films Neeson has done recently. But it's certainly not enough to make you overlook how one of our most powerful actors is again wasting his time on the kind of half-baked thriller Charles Bronson used to crank out with depressing regularity during the waning days of his career.

The time around, Neeson plays Alex Lewis , another expert hired killer with a particular set of skills. As this film opens, he's considering leaving the life behind after seeing signs of the Alzheimer’s that has already claimed his brother. Nevertheless, Alex accepts one final job in El Paso, in which he has to bump off two separate people and recover some important flash drives from the first victim. He pulls off the first hit easily enough but when he discovers that the second victim is a 12-year-old girl ( Mia Sanchez ), Alex refuses to pull the trigger and keeps the flash drives for himself as an insurance policy.

Unfortunately, the girl had been pimped out by her father to a number of wealthy and powerful people, including the depraved son of powerful real estate developer Davana Sealman ( Monica Bellucci ), who put out the original hit in order to help her child evade justice. After tying up that loose end, she also calls for Alex to be killed. But even though he's slipping mentally, he's still skillful enough to evade her hired goons and kill everyone remotely connected to the crime. Alex also plants enough clues for an FBI task force led by Vincent Serra ( Guy Pearce ), who also tried to help the girl and feels guilty about what happened to her, to pursue him while always remaining one step ahead of them.

If the basic story points of “Memory” sound familiar to you, it may be that you've seen “ The Memory of a Killer ,” the 2003 Belgian crime drama that has been Americanized here (with both films based on Jef Geeraerts ’ novel The Alzheimer Case ). Although this version more or less follows the same narrative path of its predecessor, the original film, although a perfectly good genre film in its own right, was more interested in its central character (played in a very good performance by Jan Decleir ) as he is forced to reckon with both the weight of his past misdeeds and the cruelties of his present condition. 

“Memory” does begin to work when Neeson gets a hold of script's more dramatically impactful moments, but these scenes are simply too few and far between to be truly effective. Dario Scardapane ’s screenplay tends to put more of an emphasis on the big action beats, which are implausible enough as is and doubly so when you consider that they involve a character with deteriorating cognitive abilities. Although these scenes are handled with some style by director Martin Campbell , whose oeuvre includes one of the very best James Bond films (“Casino Royale”) and a lot of stuff that will be politely overlooked here, they wind up overwhelming the human drama involving Neeson’s character. This is especially evident during a new, less thoughtful finale in which one of the key villains is dispatched in an especially gruesome manner in order to give the gorehounds in the audience a final thrill before the end credits. Other than Neeson, the only performance of note here comes from Bellucci, whose casting here is unexpected, to say the least.

“Memory” is a little better than the majority of Neeson’s recent action excursions and there's a chance it may prove to be better than most of his future projects. However, that doesn't prove to be enough to make it worth watching, and those lucky enough to have seen “The Memory of a Killer” are likely to be disappointed as well. Yes, a little more effort has gone into the making of "Memory," so it's a shame—and an ironic one to boot—that the end results are so forgettable.

Now playing in theaters.

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

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Film credits.

Memory (2022)

Rated R for violence, some bloody images and language throughout.

114 minutes

Liam Neeson as Alex Lewis

Guy Pearce as Vincent Serra

Taj Atwal as Linda Amistead

Harold Torres as Hugo Marquez

Monica Bellucci as Davana Sealman

Ray Stevenson as Detective Danny Mora

Stella Stocker as Maya

Antonio Jaramillo as Papa Leon

• Martin Campbell

Writer (book)

• Jef Geeraerts
• Dario Scardapane

Cinematographer

• David Tattersall

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Memory review: Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard rise above this film’s contrived misery

Writer-director michel franco unfurls a rolling series of revelations here – a buffet of traumas served up for the benefit of narrative intrigue, article bookmarked.

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Memory would be too contrived a work to buy into if it weren’t for the talents of Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard. Directed by Mexico’s Michel Franco – a light provocateur known for his cool-headed portraits of violent retribution against the wealthy – it’s a romantic drama of sorts, in which affection becomes secondary to suffering .

Chastain plays Sylvia, a care worker in a facility for disabled people. We first meet her at Alcoholics Anonymous , where she’s celebrating 13 years of sobriety by introducing to the group her teenage daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber). Sylvia’s life is comfortable, if cyclical and stagnant, chopped into listless pieces by Franco and his co-editor, Oscar Figueroa. But the signs of trouble are there: she seems uneasy around her sister, Olivia (Merritt Wever), and compulsively attached to a routine of home alarms and door locks. She denies her daughter’s most basic requests for independence, and rifles through her bedroom drawers.

So, when she’s browbeaten into attending a school reunion, unease spills almost naturally into outright terror when a man, Saul (Sarsgaard), sidles up to her seat. She heads home. He follows her back, all the way to her front door, and stays there until morning, resting limply on a pile of spare tyres from the garage next door.

Here begins Franco’s rolling series of revelations, a buffet of traumas served up for the benefit of narrative intrigue. It turns out Saul’s motivations were entirely innocent – as his brother Isaac (Josh Charles) explains, he has early-onset dementia. It manifests largely, for now, in erratic incidents of confusion and disorientation.

However, there’s a reason Olivia was so jumpy with him, and an accusation is introduced and then dismissed, in order to make way for even further trauma. The camera holds back in order to watch her, from afar, as she sobs in the middle of a park or in the living room after she’s confronted by her estranged and controlling mother (Jessica Harper).

Memory is eventually able to surpass all that calculated misery. Chastain and Sarsgaard invest much in the fragile connection that Olivia and Saul eventually build, and find something much more poignant between them. Saul’s dementia has left him with little of his present but much of his past – of his childhood and his long-deceased wife. In a sense, he still lives there. Sarsgaard shifts sensitively between the energised way he talks about his lost love and the subsequent shutdown his mind experiences when he’s forced to confront the fact she’s gone.

Traumatised: Jessica Chastain in ‘Memory’

Olivia, too, is stuck, albeit for very different reasons. Chastain allows the grief of a lost girlhood to twist her body inwards, to keep it taut and perpetually on the defence. When Olivia and Saul’s timid flirtations inevitably ease into physical passion, the actors move with such innocence and desperation that it’s hard not to be touched – here are two people whose minds struggle to see what’s before them, daring to hope that there’s still something to build upon. Together, both actors rise above the most blatant of Memory ’s manipulations.

Dir: Michel Franco. Starring: Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Merritt Wever, Brooke Timber, Elsie Fisher, Josh Charles, Jessica Harper. Cert 15, 99 minutes

‘ Memory ’ is in cinemas from 23 February

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Memory Review

A slick action-thriller that forges a fresh take on the genre… then forgets all about it..

Memory hits theaters on April 29, 2022.

I know what you’re thinking – Liam Neeson in yet another old man action flick. But Memory does bring something new to the table, at least: Alex Lewis (Neeson) is a hitman on the verge of retirement. But he’s hiding a terrible secret, and it’s not a government conspiracy or a trail of bodies in his wake. No, Alex has Alzheimer’s and it’s affecting his work in a big way. While Memory has a strong premise that suggests a whole new take on the action-thriller genre, it’s sadly let down by an uninspired and fairly standard storyline.

Essentially, Memory is a bog-standard action flick with a few fresh ideas thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, director Martin Campbell doesn’t quite stick the landing, with the most interesting aspects of the film feeling wildly underdeveloped.

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Take Alex’s Alzheimer’s, example. It’s not often you see a hitman grappling with the onset of a degenerative disease, and the little moments that show how it’s affecting him are some of the best in the movie. Neeson is remarkably subtle as he struggles with the memory loss, the slowing of fine motor skills, and the loss of judgement that are all early signposts for Alzheimer’s Disease.

However, often Memory feels like a missed opportunity. Although we watch Neeson struggle through some excruciatingly tense scenes, we don’t really feel what it’s like in Alex’s shoes. There’s plenty of opportunity to visualise Alex’s faltering memory in a unique and interesting way – Eternal Sunshine -style disappearing memories would have brought us closer to the man himself, just as seeing the world through his eyes would give us perspective on his condition as well as his plight.

What’s Liam Neeson’s best action flick?

Instead, we experience Alex’s trauma second hand. At various points throughout the film, he loses grip on what’s going on, often prompting him to angrily demand to know what’s happening or whimper with terrified shock at a predicament he had no idea he was in. Ironically, Neeson portrays the pain and suffering of a degenerative condition with finesse, vacillating seamlessly between seasoned contract killer and vulnerable Alzheimer’s patient. It just feels as though it could have gone a lot deeper, and as a result, it only touches the surface of what it could’ve been.

That said, Memory has some interesting style choices – especially when it comes to the way Campbell framed the action scenes. They’re often choppy, quick cut, and highly edited. At first glance, it’s another stylish way to depict frenzied, frenetic action, but it’s more than that. It’s also a neat way to approach the retiring hitman’s patchy memory by not quite showing the full sequence of events. But this, too, is sparse and underutilised.

Based on the novel De zaak Alzheimer by Jef Geeraerts, Memory trades the book’s very European setting for a Latin American twist, putting the action in El Paso, Texas. It works, too, with Alex now fighting to uncover a Mexican child prostitution ring with FBI agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce) as an unwitting aide. There are distinct shades of Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario in the way the story unfolds, and it would be easy to draw comparisons between Neeson’s ageing hitman and Benicio del Toro’s former Mexican prosecutor-turned-assassin. But it’s just that – shades. Memory is nowhere near as dark or complex, with a tendency to only delve surface deep.

Similarly, Guy Pearce’s world-weary FBI agent is almost a caricature rather than a real, warts and all portrayal of a man on the job. Pearce gets some great one-liners about how difficult it all is, with an interesting backstory that’s merely hinted at. But his character, too, is relatively underdeveloped. It’s a shame – something about this dynamic brings to mind the Luc Besson classic, Léon … but perhaps it’s just Pearce’s dodgy moustache.

Either way, there’s a lot going on underneath the surface. It’s just a shame we never really get to it.

Altogether, Memory is a surprisingly straightforward action-thriller that doesn’t quite live up to its premise. That’s a real shame, too. The twist on the tried-and-true formula is interesting enough to warrant a deeper exploration of memory and perception when it comes to such a violent profession. Sadly, it seems Campbell isn’t up to the task, stopping a bit short of making any poignant or even interesting observations. Instead, Memory meanders between rote action flick and not-quite-interesting-enough conspiracy thriller. It’s too bad that Memory is so unambitious; if it had only leaned into its intriguing premise more, it could’ve been much more than a rote action flick.

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Memory is an adequately stylish action-thriller that showcases Neeson’s deftness with a silenced pistol or a well-cut fight scene. It brings some fresh and interesting new ideas with a focus on the faltering memory of Neeson’s ageing hitman, but then does little to expand on that. Instead, we’re shown the occasional scene of Neeson forgetting something while prompting Guy Pearce to muse on the conspiracy-style plot. But the twists and turns are far too few to keep it interesting. Memory could have been a fresh and exciting take on the genre. Instead, it’s a typical old man action flick that’s ironically not very memorable at all.

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Memory Review

Despite the fact that Michel Franco’s new film focuses on an alcoholic grappling with the lingering effects of child abuse, Memory may well be his most buoyant work yet. The Mexican director, known for his violent and unforgiving plots ( After Lucia , Chronic ), is often considered something of a cinematic sadist who enjoys inflicting as much pain as possible onto his characters. This time, however, his trademark brand of screen cruelty finds a more optimistic narrative — almost feel-good in its theme of redemption.

That isn’t initially clear when we’re first introduced to Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), a recovering addict who works with adults living with learning disabilities. With a grim- set expression, her life is elaborately planned: AA meetings, a stern approach to childcare duties, a Fort Knox-like alarm system to protect her house. After meeting a kind but disoriented ex-schoolmate named Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), Sylvia’s walls slowly come down... only to show us just how deep the roots of abuse can grow, tangling and tugging below the surface.

Memory feels so compelling precisely because it keeps its cards close to its chest.

Franco has, rather unexpectedly, made a shrewd movie about the precarity of healing from trauma. Sylvia’s frequently cruel demeanour — “You deserve to be the way you are,” she says to Saul, abandoning him in the woods without his Emergency Contact lanyard — proves how the path of recovery can morph into quicksand at the slightest perceived threat or trigger. Sylvia isn’t a perfect victim, but someone whose past has hardened her into a contradictory figure that often goes against the grain.

Opposite Chastain, Sarsgaard is equally worthy. Saul’s dementia is not presented purely as a form of suffering, but is instead something that can enhance his capability for empathy; when Sylvia discloses a painful memory to him, he asks her permission to write it down so that he doesn’t forget — just one of many moments that twangs at the heartstrings. Instead of having him monologue about his condition, we get astute directorial touches instead: Saul first enters the frame out of focus, and later is speaking but framed from the neck-down — canny choices to highlight his cognitive blur, the separation between mind and body. Is he lovesick? Is he trapped in a hazy brain-prison of looped thoughts? Or is that sort of the same thing, sometimes?

Many films that deal with similar themes to this can come across as cheap in the way they reach for tear-jerking moments. But save for some moments of unnecessary exposition, Memory feels so compelling precisely because it keeps its cards close to its chest.

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Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Memory (2023)

February 19, 2024 by Robert Kojder

Memory , 2023.

Written and Directed by Michel Franco. Starring Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Merritt Wever, Josh Charles, Elsie Fisher, Jessica Harper, Brooke Timber, Jackson Dorfmann, Alexis Rae Forlenza, Elizabeth Loyacano, Josh Philip Weinstein, and Mia Mei Williamson.

Sylvia is a social worker who leads a simple and structured life. This is blown open when Saul follows her home from their high school reunion. Their surprise encounter will profoundly impact both of them as they open the door to the past.

When Jessica Chastain’s Sylvia and Peter Sarsgaard’s Saul properly privately converse in Memory for the first time following an uneasy scare the night before where the early onset dementia-stricken latter followed the former home (same subway route and all), she reveals the horrifying reason why she believes he did so. Anyone familiar with writer/director Michel Franco will be bracing themselves for more shock value that may or may not have substance. The filmmaker then spends the next 80 minutes, give or take, subverting those expectations into an emotionally stirring romance born out of their respective conditions and trauma, with quiet, gentle but powerful chemistry between these leads.

Sylvia has suffered from a history of sexual abuse that caused her to become estranged from her mother, Samantha (Jessica Harper), and embedded into a lengthy battle with alcohol addiction that she was able to quell when the birth of her now 13-year-old daughter Anna (Brooke Timber) came. Her mind is faulty in a different way, in where she accuses Saul of being a boy who often helped another boy assault her when they were 17 and she was 12, verbally blowing up on the man as he calmly sits there unaware of what to say, whether it’s because he never actually did these things or he doesn’t remember them. That mystery is cleared up instantly when Sylvia’s sister Olivia (Merritt Wever) looks into some public records and discovers that he didn’t move into the city and enroll there until the year she changed schools.

Meanwhile, Saul’s brother Isaac (Josh Charles) tells Sylvia, who also works at an adult daycare center, that she would make a good caretaker for him and that one will be needed since his daughter Sara (Elsie Fisher) is off to college. Again, when that suggestion comes in, there is that instant hesitation and pause for concern that Michel Franco is only trying to concoct the most grotesque, triggering dynamic imaginable. Even if he had gone that route, Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard probably still would have found something emotionally raw, revealing, and riveting there; that’s how captivating they are on screen together.

Rather than go down that bleak and dour route, Memory not only follows these two characters as they naturally grow closer but how Sylvia’s trauma and past have made her the adult and justifiably overprotective mother she is today. Throughout the film, Anna knows that she shouldn’t even bother asking her mom if she can go to parties or on a date with the boy she likes (even though he regularly visits their house), aware of what the answer will be. One day Anna might understand why and the truth will devastate her (without getting into spoilers, the horrors of her mom’s past are somehow more painful and disturbing than what is mentioned above.) 

Eventually, Sylvia’s mom comes into town, shedding light on the family dynamic in unsettling ways, seemingly having cast aside her daughter because of this past, to the point of nonchalantly taking it out on Anna (she brings gifts for all the grandchildren, but her) while also pretending she loves her daughters and granddaughters equally. She is also manipulating Anna to ask questions about her mom’s past. Simultaneously, Isaac disapproves of how much time Saul wants to spend with Sylvia, dehumanizing him and insisting that he doesn’t know what he is doing because of dementia, which doesn’t seem to be affecting their budding romance at all beyond his inability to process various entertainment mediums (a sad sequence in itself) and wander off while forgetting what he is doing.

The supporting performances from the closest things to villains in Memory could use a bit more nuance. There is also the feeling that the film doesn’t have much of a place to go narratively. Considering how immensely moving the performances are here, that’s not much of a fault. It is compelling watching these characters fall for one another, Anna discovering some horrifying truths about her mother’s past (there is a beautifully tender scene where she comforts her upon learning, with Brooke Timber impressive throughout), a depressing glimpse into how sexual abuse sometimes gets covered up within a family, and whether or not circumstances will allow them to be together.

By the time Sylvia and Saul are embracing one another in a bathtub, following a tense confrontation pressing their heads together, the love is beyond earned, and they are together because no one else can see these two people like they see each other. That’s the specific, beautiful love Memory is about.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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‘Memory’ Review: Hit-Man Movie Remake Is a Retread of Familiar Liam Neeson Roles

Liam Neeson plays a bad guy who goes after worse guys, while the onset of Alzheimer's complicates matters, in this tough, déjà vu action movie.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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The less you remember about 2003 Belgian thriller “ Memory of a Killer,” the better, when it comes to its remake, directed by “Casino Royale” veteran Martin Campbell . Relocated to El Paso, Texas, this new version — which channels the brutal cynicism of recent Taylor Sheridan movies, or the even more ruthless tone of Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor” — takes the bones of a tough European crime drama and uses them as the grim gallows on which to hang yet another nihilistic Liam Neeson action vehicle.

These days, such Liam Neeson movies unofficially constitute a genre unto themselves. Starting with “Taken,” the Oscar-nominated actor who so sensitively played one of the screen’s great savers of souls in “Schindler’s List” has been reborn as a symbol of retribution. “Taken” came out in 2010, the year after the shocking skiing accident of real-life wife Natasha Richardson, and it has felt as if the actor himself was transformed by that tragedy, hollowed out and reduced to a rage machine. He is, as the mad dad in that movie said, a man with “a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career,” skills that have been unexpectedly honed into this incredibly specific, incredibly lethal persona.

In film after film, multiple times a year, Neeson plays men who power forward in pursuit of vengeance or justice — like a human shark, or a deadly weapon with the safety catch removed. Through it all, Neeson remains a great actor, someone who seeks to understand the soul of such violent men, and that sets his projects apart from the countless other “Taken” knockoffs produced each year. His movies make money, and in turn, Neeson makes more movies, each one a lot like the last, to the extent that audiences reasonably know what to expect. “Memory” may surprise them — provided they’ve forgotten the movie on which it’s based, that is, since the twisty plot felt fresher in its earlier incarnation.

Neeson plays Alex Lewis, a hit man who is very good at his job. We recognize this because Alex is pushing 70 and still getting the jump on men half his age. We recognize this too because hit men so often wind up being hunted and killed by other hit men in such movies, or else moving to a Caribbean island with a bag of diamonds — but “Memory” doesn’t feel like that kind of movie. Alex is slowly losing his mind to Alzheimer’s, which means retirement isn’t likely to be so glamorous. We recognize this when, after completing his first job, he misplaces the key to his getaway vehicle. We recognize this too when he rolls up his sleeve and we see all the key details scribbled there in black marker.

At this point, audiences will no doubt remember another movie, Christopher Nolan’s backsliding puzzle-box thriller “Memento,” so it’s a bit surprising when the film introduces none other than that film’s star, Guy Pearce, as the FBI agent whose investigation into a sordid sex trafficking ring puts him on a collision course with Neeson’s character. Relatively early in the film, Campbell shows the two men sitting in neighboring cars, unaware of one another’s existence. They are driving to the same place: a safe house where Vincent Serra (Pearce) is trying to protect a teenage girl who’s meant to be a key witness in his case. Alex has been sent there to kill her.

Alex gets as far as the girl’s bedroom before deciding not to pull the trigger. But the decision is much deeper than that. In refusing to fulfill the assignment, he’s signing his own death warrant. He will be hunted by other hit men, and he will take as many of the bad guys with him before he goes as possible. Alex knows he’s no hero, but there are worse people than him in the world, and “Memory” becomes a kind of brutal cleanup exercise in which he can achieve what law enforcement can’t. Typically, he’s the tool people call to snuff the star witness before the trial. Now, he’s the one who can step in when the police move too slow. For this to work, Alex and Vincent must make a sort of uneasy arrangement, and audiences must accept that the entire justice system is broken.

Alex’s employer, it turns out, is a powerful Texas millionaire, embodied by Monica Bellucci as a woman who once was beautiful and now is obsessed with trying to prolong her own life. Her character is complicit in an underage sex ring, the likes of which righteous QAnon followers are so adamant lurks in the shadows of American society. Maybe it does. In “Memory,” Neeson could be their very own action hero, working his way up the chain until he’s dismantled the whole operation.

There’s less action here than you might assume. Campbell’s directing style is typically energetic, shot with a muscular moving camera. But when the violence comes, it’s sudden, unexpected and irreversible. At one point, Alex makes a car blow up, and Campbell shows the explosions from miles away, a tiny flash of fire all but lost in a wide shot of El Paso. Later, Alex kills a man at the gym, and the murder goes unseen and unheard by the woman working out in the foreground.

In the end, “Memory” isn’t terribly convincing, but it’s at least trying for something more serious than most. Released earlier this year, thematically similar “Catch the Fair One” was a far better movie. But it didn’t star Liam Neeson. And if that’s a prerequisite when picking such films, you could certainly do worse than “Memory.”

Reviewed online, April 26, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 114 MIN.

• Production: A Briarcliff Entertainment, Open Road Films release of a Briarcliff Entertainment, Open Road Films, Black Bear Pictures presentation of a Welle Entertainment production, in association with Saville Prods., Arthur Sarkissian production. Producers: Cathy Shulman, Moshe Diamant, Rupert Maconick, Michael Heimler, Arthur Sarkissian. Executive producers: Teddy Schwarzman, Ben Stillman, Peter Bouckaert, Rudy Durand, Tom Ortenberg, James Masciello, Matthew Sidari.
• Crew: Director: Martin Campbell. Screenplay: Dario Scardapane, based on the picture "De Zaak Alzheimer" by Carl Joos, Erik Van Looy. Camera: David Tattersall. Editor: Jo Francis. Music: Rupert Parkes.
• With: Liam Neeson, Guy Pearce, Monica Bellucci, Taj Atwal, Ray Fearon, Harold Torres.

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Liam Neeson’s Taken era is memorable, but his new revenge film Memory isn’t

It’s the beginning of the end for one of Neeson’s particular set of skills

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Share All sharing options for: Liam Neeson’s Taken era is memorable, but his new revenge film Memory isn’t

In retrospect, it’s remarkable how long a shadow Taken has cast. It’s been 14 years since director Pierre Morel redefined Liam Neeson’s place in cinema with his 2008 film, which cast the dramatic actor against type as an ex-CIA operative and combat powerhouse. Since then, too many action films starring Neeson have followed the steps of a familiar dance. His peaceful domestic life is shattered when something is taken from him: His daughter is kidnapped ( Taken ), and so is his ex-wife ( Taken 2 ), who’s then murdered in Taken 3 . Or his son is murdered ( Cold Pursuit ), he loses his job ( The Commuter ), or his family moves on without him ( Unknown ). In each case, a long-buried history of clinically effective violence is unearthed, and for about two hours, Neeson makes the criminal element sorry they ever thought picking on a guy in his 60s would be easy. Memory is the latest of these films, and at first, it seems like it’s capable of subverting the formula. Then it slowly settles into tired mimicry.

Memory begins with a slight inversion of the Neeson Action Formula: This time, he’s one of the bad guys, kind of. Neeson plays Alex Lewis, a world-class assassin who takes jobs from some of the worst people in the world. When he’s asked to do the one thing you never ask an action hero to do — kill a kid — Neeson turns on his employers. As he becomes a vigilante determined to make them pay, he’s hunted by both sides, with criminals and law enforcement coming at him along the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. His chief pursuer: FBI agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce), who’s after the same guys Alex is.

Memory ’s big swerve is that Alex is in a race against time. His health is deteriorating, and he’s suffering from memory loss, a harbinger of severe cognitive decline to come. This means he isn’t just out to punish a crime syndicate for crossing a line; he’s trying to symbolically atone for a life of ill-gotten gains while he’s still capable of taking meaningful action.

On its own, Memory is a tepid thriller, competently made. Journeyman director Martin Campbell has reliably delivered exciting action sequences in films running the gamut from extraordinary (the 2006 James Bond reboot Casino Royale ) to surprising (Jackie Chan’s 2017 Taken riff The Foreigner ) to forgettable (2021’s Maggie Q vehicle The Protégé ). In terms of the actual action, Memory is firmly a lesser work from Campbell, who seems more interested this time around in ineffective melodrama than in physical conflict. The promise of any Liam Neeson action movie is Liam Neeson committing startling acts of brutality, but Memory follows Alex around as he threatens a lot of people with violence while only occasionally committing any.

Neeson reads as if he’s operating in the same mode of desperate competence he originally perfected in Taken . Yet in Memory , the thrill is gone — his intensity is no longer surprising, and as committed as Neeson is to remaining on screen and present for most of his character’s stunts, his limitations appear more apparent than usual, given Campbell’s clear shot blocking and the clean cuts that stitch the film’s action scenes together so neatly. Arguably, the film suffers from these two men being too good at their jobs, so one’s commitment overexposes the others’ shortcomings.

More compelling is Guy Pearce’s weary Agent Serra, who at times serves as the de facto protagonist when Memory ’s script demands that Alex disappear for a while. Serra’s investigation into Alex’s criminal employers is the one place where Memory makes anything approaching a compelling statement, even if it’s a shopworn one about the institution of law enforcement and the ways it’s used to enforce the status quo more than to find justice.

Memory ’s most fascinating aspect ultimately lies outside of the film itself, if it’s read as a meta-commentary on Neeson’s action oeuvre. As Alex, Neeson is portraying a man who knows he can’t continue being the kind of person Neeson has played across so many movies. The film plays better — but only slightly — if viewers consider the comments Neeson made in early 2021 about being ready to retire from this kind of film after only a few more (presumably Memory and his forthcoming thriller Retribution ) .

In many of these films, Neeson has been an unlikely avatar for white upper-class male rage. The appeal of his late-career turn as an action star is a direct result of the dissonance between his well-mannered demeanor and the violence these characters commit. His sonorous voice — which has led to a long voice-acting career and frequent casting in mentor-type roles — doesn’t belie the brutality these characters all eventually give way to. Under this reading, Neeson’s action movies are about the order whiteness and wealth has imposed on the world, the male sense of entitlement to that order, and the violence lurking beneath it, aimed at anyone who tries to disrupt it. It started with a film called Taken , and it’s no coincidence that most of these films are incited by a man feeling robbed.

This is curious, because these films are never about the theft of possessions — they’re about losing other people and losing status. The lives of his many characters’ loved ones are on the line, but often so is the sense of possession and control these men felt over their lives. They all have a sense of ownership extending over their family members, their jobs, and their right to cut out the middleman of law enforcement and kill people.

Memory is not Liam Neeson’s final action film, and it won’t be the one that defines him. But it’s worth considering as his tenure of mannered cinematic vengeance slowly comes to a close. In this case, it’s with a character suddenly attempting to atone for the man he’s been, right before his own history evaporates from his mind. It isn’t terribly convincing — even though Alex Lewis confesses that he’s been a bad guy, Memory is still built around the thrill of seeing that bad guy unleashed. There is little that suggests Alex Lewis is all that different from Bryan in the Taken movies, or any of Neeson’s other violent avatars. It’s worth remembering this era of cinema, and everything it says about specifically male fantasies and male rage. But it isn’t necessarily worth remembering Memory itself.

Memory opens in theaters on April 29.

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2022, Action/Mystery & thriller, 1h 54m

What to know

Critics Consensus

A pale facsimile of better action thrillers by star Liam Neeson or director Martin Campbell, Memory proves to be one of their most forgettable efforts yet. Read critic reviews

Audience Says

It might not be Liam Neeson's best action movie, but if you're in the mood to watch him exercise a particular set of skills, Memory delivers. Read audience reviews

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Memory videos, memory   photos.

Alex Lewis (Liam Neeson) is a hired assassin at a turning point. Living in El Paso, Texas, and coming to grips with a faltering memory just as he plans to retire, Alex is ready to conclude a long career of violence and secrecy when an old contact gives him a final assignment. However, the job isn't what Alex bargained for, and leads him into an FBI sting operation led by agent Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce). When Alex finds a trail of abuse leading from a child prostitution ring south of the border to a wealth influential El Paso real estate magnate (Monica Bellucci) and her son (Josh Taylor), Alex secretly guides Serra's FBI team in the right direction. Though his inability to remember details is putting him in ever greater danger, Alex uses the skills he's honed from a lifetime in the shadows to force ugliness into the light--but he has to do it before powerful forces destroy Alex and erase Serra's mission to get at the truth.

Rating: R (Some Bloody Images|Language Throughout|Violence)

Genre: Action, Mystery & thriller

Original Language: English

Director: Martin Campbell

Producer: Cathy Schulman , Moshe Diamant , Rupert Maconick , Michael Heimler , Arthur M. Sarkissian

Writer: Dario Scardapane

Release Date (Theaters): Apr 29, 2022  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Oct 7, 2022

Box Office (Gross USA): $6.7M

Runtime: 1h 54m

Distributor: Open Road, Briarcliff Entertainment

Production Co: Saville Productions, Welle Entertainment, Arthur Sarkissian Productions

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

Cast & Crew

Liam Neeson

Vincent Serra

Monica Bellucci

Davana Sealman

Linda Amistead

Gerald Nussbaum

Harold Torres

Hugo Marquez

Ray Stevenson

Detective Danny Mora

Louis Mandylor

Drunk broker

Martin Campbell

Dario Scardapane

Screenwriter

Cathy Schulman

Moshe Diamant

Rupert Maconick

Michael Heimler

Arthur M. Sarkissian

Teddy Schwarzman

Executive Producer

Ben Stillman

Peter Bouckaert

Rudy Durand

Tom Ortenberg

James Masciello

Matthew Sidari

David Tattersall

Cinematographer

Film Editing

Rupert Parkes

Original Music

Production Design

Set Decoration

Irina Kotcheva

Costume Design

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‘Memoria’ Review: In Search of Lost Time

Tilda Swinton stars in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s elusive and enchanting new film, set in Colombia.

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By A.O. Scott

In the middle of the night, Jessica hears a noise — loud and slightly metallic, somewhere between a bang and thud. Later, talking with a young sound engineer named Hernán, she will describe it as large ball of concrete slamming into a metal wall surrounded by seawater, a remarkably vivid image that Hernán patiently attempts to synthesize.

Jessica, a British expatriate living in Colombia and played by Tilda Swinton, refers to what she heard as “my sound” — “mi sonido” in Spanish — and it seems to exist for her ears alone. Or rather for her and the audience watching “Memoria,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s enigmatic and enchanting new film.

The sound startles Jessica at dinner with her sister (Agnes Brekke) and brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho), and follows her from Bogotá to a small town in the mountains. The possibility that it’s an auditory hallucination is raised at one point, and there are other moments when the reliability of Jessica’s perception seems to be in question. Is Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) a figment of her imagination? If so, how could he have offered to buy her a refrigerator for the orchids she is raising on her farm in Medellín?

Even though Jessica visits a rural doctor, asking for Xanax to help her sleep — the doctor offers Jesus as a safer, more effective treatment — her psychological state isn’t really what “Memoria” is about. Saying exactly what it is about poses a quandary that multiple viewings are unlikely to dispel. Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery.

Whenever you think you have a handle on where the story might be going, the ground shifts. Jessica is baffled by the sound and other, vaguely similar phenomena, but she doesn’t seem to be delusional, or even unduly troubled. She is curious, gently questioning people she meets — notably an anthropologist (Jeanne Balibar) and a second, older Hernán (Elkin Díaz) — about their work and its potential relevance to her situation. The film operates in a similar spirit, following an invisible map toward a surprising destination.

Along the way, Weerasethakul pauses to contemplate the remnants of ancient civilizations and the chaos of a modern life, as flickerings of supernaturalism, disrupted chronology, science fiction and the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges illuminate Jessica’s journey.

The director, most of whose previous films take place in Thailand, has a longstanding interest in the visual, social and metaphysical contrasts between city and countryside. His urban spaces, like the university where the first Hernán works and the hospital where Jessica’s sister is a patient, tend to be sleek and institutional, governed less by commerce or political authority than by science and technology. The Southeast Asian jungles in his “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” — and the lush Andean mountainside where the second Hernán makes his home — are zones of magic, where the modern distinction between myth and fact does not apply.

This doesn’t quite make Weerasethakul a magical realist, though the South American setting of “Memoria” might make that description especially tempting. His imagination is philosophical and speculative, and in style he is more a poet than a fabulist, at home in the gaps between our various ways of making sense of the world.

His refusal to explain can be a challenge, and “Memoria” demands patience and attention. I found it an emotionally wrenching and intellectually fulfilling experience, but not one I can easily summarize or classify, partly because the feeling of radical uncertainty — Jessica’s feeling, but also mine — was a little too real. Her gradual unmooring from any stable sense of reality, and her perseverance in spite of that dislocation, strike me as utterly familiar, even as the causes of her alienation remains elusive. I am haunted by the plight of the second Hernán, a man blessed and cursed with a prodigious memory that connects him to a universe of suffering even as it condemns him to a state of isolation.

Swinton and Díaz are subtle, charismatic performers, and their scenes together, which make up most of the film’s last section, bring it to a new level of intensity. What passes between Jessica and Hernán, and the sequence of images that follows, represent a quietly mind-blowing moment of cinema, something as wild and argument-provoking now as the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey” was in 1968.

You have to see it to believe it, and to see it you’ll have to go to a movie theater. “Memoria” is opening in New York this week and then making its way across the country, one cinema at a time. It’s worth the wait, and the trip.

Memoria Rated PG. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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A novel as ambitious as a ‘Great British Baking’ showstopper

Ko’s new novel, ‘memory piece,’ is a sweeping story about three women whose lives diverge and connect over the decades.

When I came across a blurb proclaiming Lisa Ko’s second novel, “ Memory Piece ,” to be a book about “everything,” I hitched an eyebrow. Everything ? I thought. Really?

Pretty much. This is a novel that explores, among other things: chosen vs. blood family, artistry, work, the internet, capitalism, activism, communal living, class, elitism, exploitation, surveillance, lesbianism, bisexuality, memory, time, and the particular thrills and rigors of being a young person in New York City, or just being a person at all.

That’s a lot. Still, for the most part, Ko pulls it off, like one of those towering “Great British Baking Show” confections that defy gravity.

The best element of “Memory Piece” is the three women at the center of the story. Ko, whose previous novel, “The Leavers” (2017), traced a young man’s search for his mother, an undocumented immigrant in New York, draws characters with such deftness that they feel wholly alive. Details add up over time to create dazzling dimensionality. We see the characters as they see themselves, and as they see each other, allowing for a panoramic view.

Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong and Ellen Ng meet as preteens in the 1980s in the New York area and become, if not best friends, lifelong familiars, drifting into and out of each other’s orbits. Their career paths are as varied as their personalities: Giselle is a shape-shifting, rigor-loving performance artist; Jackie a brilliant, insular coder; Ellen a strong-willed, plain-spoken activist.

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“Memory Piece” is divided into three sections of roughly equal length — one each from Giselle’s, Jackie’s and Ellen’s point of view — plus a fourth section composed of micro-chapters with shifting perspectives (explaining more would only spoil).

Giselle’s section, the first, is strongest. It unfurls elegantly with a hypnotic immediacy, starting with her early teen years. Part of the appeal is nostalgia: Women will remember bra shopping with their mothers, as Giselle does with her own mom, Mercy, on the eve of starting seventh grade. “Like Kodak film, she waited to develop, jumping in front of the mirror each morning until finally she spied movement, two minuscule meatballs. In a Kmart dressing room with ossified gum on the walls, Mercy scrutinized the meatballs, snug in two bright white cups with a rose sewn in the middle.”

We track Giselle’s maturation from a girl hemmed in by familial expectations and Jersey suburbia to a woman endlessly reinventing herself. She becomes an amateur collagist, then a daring performance artist. Her first year-long piece involves living in a secret room in a Paramus Park mall, sans books, television or other modes of entertainment, only leaving the room at night when the mall is closed. (In a sense, this will be her first vanishing act, but not the last.) No one knows until it’s done — except Jackie, who sneaks in food and sneaks out buckets of waste.

Jackie’s segment, the second, drags at the outset. It’s the late ’90s, and she’s working in tech for a Postmates-like company, hating it, and spending most of her spare time working on Lene, a service she lovingly created that helps people publish their web diaries. She rarely sees friends. Her only regular, non-work-related social interaction is with a woman she met online who lives thousands of miles away. Jackie’s pages contain many a tech reference — IPOs and VCs; hard drives and web hosting; clever allusions to real-life tech figures — but all her aloneness and computer-y talk could cause some readers to check out. (Techies, though, might be tickled.)

Things pick up when she reconnects with Ellen and meets her motley crew of East Village squatter pals, a resourceful bunch in the process of cleaning out, beautifying and occupying an abandoned building. There may be spotty heating, suspect plumbing and stuff everywhere, but the squat also offers community, companionship — something resembling love.

Ellen rejects convention — 9-to-5’s can’t contain her — in favor of a radical reimagining of how to live. And it is she who yanks us into the future. We find her, in the third section, scraping by in a dystopian America. Imagine present-day inequities stretched to hair-raising conclusions. What if the gig economy was the only option left for scores of workers, except the megarich? What if surveillance and censorship were ultra-magnified, each person given an individual “threat level”? What if things got worse, worse, worse, decaying by degrees “so gradual at first that people hardly noticed, and then, so fast, until everything was security forces and management companies, pigs and soldiers. The places we used to go were no longer accessible to us, and it was normal to not get paid on time or ever, to work sixty-hour weeks and still not be able to afford electricity or heat or food and water.”

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Ko doesn’t clearly explain the descent into this militaristic surveillance state, which stretches credulity but doesn’t detract from the sense of doom. Another mystery: The puzzling black-and-white images that crop up between sections. These are explained by the novel’s end, a denouement that’s unexpected, if a bit scattered and overstuffed. The everything of it all diminishes what could’ve been a more pointed conclusion.

But there is much to admire in “Memory Piece.” The originality. The vastness. The main characters’ depth and breadth. The reflections about who or what gives a life meaning. Also: Ko does something interesting with race. Giselle, Jackie and Ellen are Asian American, but race isn’t the primary aspect of any woman’s identity — it’s a facet, not a centerpiece. They’re more molded by their environments and passions. At one point, Ellen bristles when an art critic insinuates that Giselle’s artistic aesthetic derives from her Asian heritage. “This made me laugh,” Ellen thinks, “because Mall Piece came out of her growing up in New Jersey.” It’s refreshing.

Nneka McGuire, a former editor at The Washington Post, is a writer in Chicago.

Memory Piece

Riverhead. 304 pp. $24.99

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