Sylvia clings to her life with a death grip—knuckles white, joints straining with pressure.
She must. Sylvia has a daughter to think about. A daughter the same age she was when … well, she doesn’t like to talk about it. Not what she did. Not what they made her do.
They forced her to change schools after that, but her life careened out of control anyway. Drinking. Drugs. But when she had Anna, Sylvia put a stop to it all. For 13 years—ever since Anna came along—she’s been sober, responsible, reliable. She’s determined to be a good mother, to keep Anna safe: no phones, no boys, the barest of social interactions. She doesn’t want Anna to experience what she did. To—
No, never mind. She doesn’t like to talk about it. Doesn’t like to think about it.
But one night, she’s forced to go back. Her sister, Olivia, encourages her to go to a party with her—just to see some old friends from high school, renew some old bonds. Sylvia barely sees anyone these days, and that can’t be healthy, right?
Sylvia doesn’t want to see these people. For most of them, Woodbury High marked the best of times. Not for Sylvia. The memories she’s so firmly locked away claw at the other side of the door, nails grating down the sides.
But she goes and sits. She listens (“Thank you for making high school the special period it was,”a woman drones into a handheld mic) and watches and … then.
He stares across the room.
He walks toward her.
He sits beside her. Staring. Leering.
Sylvia gets up and leaves. He knows, she thinks to herself. He was probably one of them.
And as she walks away—down the street at a quick clip—he follows. Follows down the street. Onto the train. Through her neighborhood. To her apartment building door.
He can’t get in: The building door requires a buzz from one of the residents to enter, and Sylvia guards her own apartment with lock after lock. But when she—and Anna, too—look out the window, he’s there. Staring up. Staring up even as the rain begins to come.
Sylvia goes to bed, terrified. What if he’s still there in the morning?
He is, slumped against a tower of old tires, covering himself with old trash bags for warmth.
Perhaps he was one of those boys who damaged Sylvia so badly. Almost certainly he was. But there’s something else at work here, too.
Sylvia walks downstairs. And gently, she takes his phone.
We learn that the man who followed Sylvia home, Saul, is far from the evil man whom Sylvia took him to be. He suffers from early onset dementia and insists that he has no idea why he followed her home. But it’s clear that Saul means Sylvia no harm. He’s calm and compassionate and—once he understands the situation—deeply sorry that he scared Sylvia so badly.
Sylvia’s no stranger to people dealing with mental issues. She works at an adult daycare center and works with several people who need a little help, a little supervision. And while her first interactions with Saul are rocky and even spiteful, she comes to see Saul as a kind, even loving soul.
Saul’s brother (Isaac) and niece (Sara) eventually talk Sylvia into being something of a caretaker for him. But Sylvia needs help, too, And their relationship evolves to the point where they’re taking care of each other: Sylvia reminds Saul of his wife (who died years before). Saul becomes perhaps the only man whom Sylvia can truly trust. And as the movie goes on, we see them not only help each other, but heal.
We can’t leave this section of the review without mentioning Anna, Sylvia’s 12- or 13-year-old daughter. Sylvia loves Anna with a certain maternal ferocity, and even a character who’s critical of Sylvia admits that she’s a great mom. But Anna clearly loves and cares for Sylvia, too—and Anna defends her mother just as fiercely as Sylvia does her.
There’s not an explicit mention of faith or religion anywhere in Memory. But in one critical scene, Sylvia stands in a subway terminal—wavering about whether to get on the train or not. According to the flashing signs on the train, it’s heading for “Church Av” and “Crosstown Local”—as Sylvia stands at a personal crossroad herself, wondering whether to show a little grace to someone. Also interesting to me: Saul, his brother Isaac and niece Sara all have biblical names. That, perhaps, is no accident.
Because of some previous experiences (which we’ll discuss in the section below), Sylvia has understandable trust and intimacy issues. But her slow-developing relationship with Saul proves to be the exception.
That relationship starts as a professional one: Sylvia is paid to watch Saul. In one instance, Sylvia goes to Saul’s home and finds him lying, naked, on the bathroom floor. He’s been lying there for perhaps hours, unable to apparently stand or open the door. (We see him from the front, obviously naked and his genitals only partly obscured by shadow.) Sylvia professionally helps him up and throws a towel over his shoulders to partly cover him.
But the relational lines begin to blur as they watch a movie and end up in a companionable cuddle. Sylvia stops “watching” Saul then—but soon, they begin to “see” each other, not as caretaker and client, but as boyfriend and girlfriend. They kiss and go on dates and, soon, wind up in bed together. That entry into a more physically intimate stage feels incredibly uncomfortable; Sylvia never seems more guarded and terrified. But as the encounter wears on (and the audience sees a lot of it, though the couple do the act under a heavy comforter), the terror fades into pleasure and desire.
The two kiss and embrace in a bathtub, too. He’s completely clothed, but she’s naked, and we see the side of her breast. In another bedroom scene, Sylvia sits up in bed wearing only a bra over her torso. Saul is often seen shirtless and, at one point, leaves home in just his boxer-style underwear. Anna also walks in on Saul naked, and she (and we) see his exposed rear. (He continues what he’s doing, oblivious that anything’s amiss.)
Anna expresses her desire to start dating, but Sylvia’s having none of it. Whenever a boy even talks with Anna, her mother’s quick to step in and put a stop to it.
We learn that Sylvia, at the age of 12, was habitually forced to perform sexual acts with much older boys. Her primary abuser, Ben, was five years older and apparently never punished. “He liked raping me,” she says—and that abuser often encouraged other older teens to assault Sylvia, too. She initially believes that Saul was one of those teens, and she graphically describes what she believes she was forced to do. (Sylvia later discovers that Saul wasn’t one of her abusers: He transferred into the school the year she left.)
[Spoiler Warning] That wasn’t the first time that Sylvia had been abused. We learn that she’d been habitually raped by her father as well. Her mother, Samantha, refused to believe Sylvia—slapping her if her daughter ever tried to speak the truth. And when Sylvia’s sister, Olivia, also tried to tell Samantha what she saw, Samantha slapped her, too. (Samantha also insisted that Sylvia was lying about Ben’s abuse; instead of taking the issue up, she forced Sylvia to switch schools.)
Two uses of the f-word. Other than that, we just hear three misuses of God’s name and one crude word referencing the male anatomy.
The movie opens in Sylvia’s Alcoholics Anonymous meeting—a meeting she’s been attending faithfully for 13 years. We hear some other people share their stories, and her fellow alcoholics celebrate Sylvia’s 13 years of sobriety. Anna’s there, too, and she tells Sylvia how proud she is of her. And Sylvia tells Anna, “You’re what I wish I could’ve been.”
Sylvia says Ben regularly got her drunk after school before forcing her to engage in sexual acts. Sylvia’s mother, Samantha, recalls Sylvia being “uncontrollable,” drinking and hanging with a wild crowd. When Sylvia tells her nieces and nephews that she doesn’t drink because she’s an alcoholic, they question her about what that means and about what else she would’ve done—questions that are quickly cut short by the kids’ father.
Anna’s not so innocent as Sylvia would like to believe. Sylvia discovers a marijuana joint in her daughter’s possessions, which leads to a period of estrangement. Later, Anna says that she doesn’t drink or smoke, but she lets slip that one of her underage cousins does drink and used to smoke.
We see some characters drink wine and beer. Saul takes medication for his dementia.
Trust and betrayal are important themes in Memory: Samantha doesn’t believe (or says she doesn’t believe) that Sylvia was subjected to the horrific acts she says she was. The two haven’t talked in years. Sylvia already would’ve grown up incredibly damaged because of the acts themselves. But her own mother’s denials and lack of support compound that damage.
When Sylvia believes that Saul was one of her past abusers, she takes him on a walk, confronts him about his alleged misdeeds and steals his identification necklace (which let folks know that he has dementia). Given that Saul likely wouldn’t know how to get home, it’s a cruel and potentially dangerous act—but Sylvia has a change of heart and returns the necklace to Saul.
The title, Memory, is apt. It centers on two characters: One struggles to remember, the other would love to forget.
We, too, are creatures of story. We’re built of our experiences, and each moment is a brick in our own personal edifices. But bricks can be twisted (as in Sylvia’s case), or the mortar of memory itself can crumble (as in Saul’s).
Memory tells the story of two broken characters who manage to prop each other up a bit. They care for each other. Ultimately, they fall in love. And thanks to their curious relationship, they begin to heal.
But while Sylvia and Saul’s story is complex and deeply nuanced, other characters here are one-dimensional caricatures. Memory pushes us to root for an emotional climax and maybe ignore just what their story might’ve looked like had the film been 30 minutes longer. Sylvia, after all, might’ve been immeasurably helped by Saul’s kindness. But Saul’s own condition isn’t going away. And perhaps some of the pragmatic caution that his brother, Isaac, shows for Saul—caution that Saul, Sylvia and the movie itself waves dismissively away—might not look quite so villainous in a broader narrative context.
The film has other blind spots, of course. It could’ve done without the nudity or the f-words—both of which push the film into R-rated territory.
But perhaps that R rating is, in this case, a good thing.
Throughout the film, many of the characters—including Sylvia herself—seem unwilling or unable to talk about her past. She keeps her full story away from her own daughter. Her sister’s family seems embarrassed to talk about her years of sobriety, because they’d need to discuss the alcoholism that necessitated it. And when Sylvia’s past spills messily out, you almost get the feeling that many would rather spontaneously combust than deal with it or the aftermath.
Yes, these issues are hard ones—hard for a movie to tackle, even harder in real life. This is not a story for children. This—even minus the nudity, minus the profanity—is a tale that should be restricted.
But that doesn’t mean those issues should be ignored.
Our pasts are messy. Painful. Sometimes horrific. Moments in our lives can damage us. They can leave scars that last a lifetime. But it does little good to forget or pretend they didn’t happen. To heal, we must deal with them. To move forward, we must remember.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
