Caught The Forgotten off the TiVO tonight. Not exactly a great movie, but not completely bad, certainly not one of those "There's 95 minutes of your life you're never going to get back," movies.
The problem with saying that, of course, is now I'm thinking about how wretched it really was. Nothing makes much sense, really, but there is one effect, used four times, total, that was shocking each time it was deployed. The ending, of course, completely sucked. On the whole I can't recommend it, but it still got me thinking.
The whole premise of the movie is that the mom, Julianne Moore, refuses to stop mourning her son who was killed in a plane crash 14 months before. She can't forget him, even when everyone around her is telling her that she has been delusional and made the whole thing up, and all physical evidence of her son's existence has vanished. At one point the Bad Guy forces her to remember the very first moment she saw her son in the delivery room. The Bad Guy needs to steal that memory, and supposedly every other memory stemming from that moment, so that she finally will forget.
What happens, of course, is that she remembers being pregnant: "I had Life inside me," she says. And from that point, of course, she's able to remember everything, even though the Bad Guy had thought he'd got it all. This is one of the major plot holes that makes the movie suck: why didn't the Bad Guy take her back to the moment the pregnancy test was positive, or when she first realized her period was late? Because clearly, the Bad Guy believes Life begins at birth.
Silly Bad Guy, don't you realize that Life begins at conception? Julianne Moore certainly preached it in this movie. It was the reason she couldn't forget her son, and the only reason she gets him back in the end.
I don't know how actors and writers and the Hollywood crowd in general reconcile the pro-life messages in the movies they make with their own beliefs. It's not ironic, it's weird. Maybe they're just "playing to the audience" and giving Middle America what it wants to see -- but even then, there's some realization that most people see a pregnant woman and think, "There's a baby in there." Most likely, though, they don't bother to think through to this level, and figure that characters like Moore's here make for a "good strong story."
The story here was so riddled with plotholes that it barely held together, but the one thing that did consistently work throughout was that mother's faith in her memories. The only reason that worked is because her feelings reflected the feelings of every mother sitting in the audience: I had Life inside me.
Even the Hollywood types understand that's not something you can ever forget.
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