Mr. Nobody (2009)

Jean: Nemo, do I matter to you? I'd just like to ask you one question. Did you do it on purpose? I found this on the bedside table.
Nemo: There comes a time in life where everything seems narrow. Choices have been made. I can only continue on. I know myself like the back of my hand. I can predict my every reaction. My life has been cast in cement with airbags and seat-belts.  I've done everything to reach this point and now that I'm here, I'm fucking bored. The hardest thing is knowing whether I'm still alive.

Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto) is 118, and supposedly the last living mortal on Earth where everyone else has been immortalized. As the world is curious about his past life, a journalist enters who tries to make sense of it all and wants to know how it felt in a world where humans were mortals and "before sex became obsolete". Nemo starts his story from the beginning before he was born - in a place where children know everything about the future until they enter the world.

His narration takes 3 different paths, with diversions again in each of those paths. The choices start at a time when Nemo was only nine years old, and he had to decide whether to stay with his father or with his mother. In the path where he chooses his father, he grows up to be a nerd with low social skills and falls in love with Elise (Sarah Polley). In one version of that path, he is married to Elise with kids, while Elise is having a breakdown after being unable to let go of her first love. In another path where he chooses his mom, he is in love with Anna (Diana Kruger) - a love that is reciprocated. In a different version of the same path, he is married to Jean (Lin Dan Pham), however, that path has an overlap with the path where he gets rejected by Elise during the early years. Confused, eh? Well, the journalist definitely was.

With a plot such as this, there isn't much of "acting" to be done as the whole movie is narrated in flashbacks with a voice-over. The movie talks about the "impossibility of a choice" that a nine-year old child is faced with and how life-altering and irreversible can that choice be. As Nemo says, "as long as you don't choose, everything remains possible". Tell me about it. We don't need a 118 year-old man to give us "gyan" about that in a sci-fi set-up. Though I loved the second last line of the quote I have posted on top. Deep down, I knew that too, but just that I never articulated it.

For the most part, the plot seems to have been taken from Butterfly Effect and also has similarities with Slaughterhouse 5 (which I'm currently reading) when it talks of time not necessarily moving in one direction. But I'll make no comparisons since Butterfly Effect is one of my favorite movies which leaves it open-ended but still suggests that the central character was imagining it all because of his guilt when his childhood sweetheart commits suicide. Remember, in the opening scene while at the asylum, he writes in his diary, "I did everything to save her"? I have had enough arguments about Butterfly Effect with my friends, but we'll leave it to another day. In Mr. Nobody, somehow the pieces are still contradictory, even if one tries to explain it considering that it's a sci-fi. One major loophole in the plot being why the kid was asked to choose when a train is about to leave? (That's not my original thought, but credit to someone who asked the question why hadn't the parents discussed their separation before reaching the train station). I'm not sure if the director also knew what he was aiming for. As they say, if you can't convince them, confuse them. The one who comes out understanding it all is a effing intellectual. Or may be I need to watch it again, but it's definitely not worth the effort.

Rating: 6.5/10