The Elephant's Memory

Rating: Null/10 (21 August 2002)

Spoilers herein.
Some films are effective because they competently push all the buttons. Some work because they effectively transport you an unfamiliar place. And some reveal some new way of folding your imagination. This film shifts among these three excellent qualities, depending who is making the decisions.
Of these three, only the last really matters. Oh, a good empathetic cry is worthwhile, especially if I can congratulate myself on my understanding, charitable nature. But that's cheap. What really matters in this film are the few places where the producers let David Lynch do his thing. There are two:
--The first is the sequence in France where Bytes has taken up with the freak show that seemingly is the original one visited by Treves. This sequence is clearly patterned on the amazing `Freaks,' elaborating and extending many of the images first invented there. Leading up to the escape by the edge of the water, which is the single image that permanently rests in mind and anchors this whole film.
Lynch (and most other intelligent filmmakers) is obsessed with what it means to make a show. Except for the obvious (Trevers is much like Bytes but with clean sheets), there isn't much exploration of what society accepts as a `show' except for this and the next mentioned:
--The freak show is mirrored by the other show Lynch is allowed to mess with, the play. This is also a show, but this time Merrick is a spectator. There are also wonders; also natural and societal forces at play; also an imprisoned ogre who presumably is shown to have a heart of gold. By 1980, it is already a hard rule that the abstraction `distance' between a film and the film or play within the film must be the same as between the film and `real' life. And so it is here.
These two sequences of the freak show and the play, clearly siblings, are the two places Lynch has been allowed to be Lynch, and they are inventive, trenchant and lasting. But where Brooks and company constrained Lynch, we have a failure: all that stuff about clouds and smoke and boilers. I suppose (knowing his later work) that he was going for the industrialization as a Victorian template (mapped to the hospital's rigid rules: `we only help patients who can be cured'). Going for the `hey, that's me struggling against the machine of society,' and linking that machine to machine of show business. (The name : `Bytes' was designed to further that notion.) Constraining him thus certainly was a wise decision given the goals of the film, and the emphasis on the actors. But I dare say that it would have been a better, more important and visceral experience if there had been less mawkish sentimentality and more image; fewer gems of actors' effects and more cinematic structure.
Lynch and Freddy Francis were to team up again for `The Straight Story' where it is all about what they couldn't do here.
Elsewhere, I have come down pretty hard on Anthony Hopkins' acting style, which is mannered, lazy, and completely uninterested in the director's intent. That comes from being constantly celebrated. But here, we have none of that. He is focused, committed, new in the character's skin. It is not really fine acting, where the doctor's skin itself would be worn and mannered, but there is no room in this film for such stuff. All the actors have to be abstractly sharp, and they are (except the boss's wife, who is dreadful). And he is the sharpest.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.