What a weird movie. The Forgotten starts out as a heartbreaking melodrama, then morphs into an FBI-conspiracy/cop thriller, becomes an outsiders-on-the-run road movie, before suddenly going all X-Files.
These narrative mutations are well-handled, giving the movie its plot excitement. It is hard, though, to give the reader a neat summary without giving it all away — I have probably revealed too much already. So you’ll have to be satisfied with the following, though I daresay that nowadays most trailers tell you the whole story right up to the climax, so for all I know the entire plot is already common knowledge.
Julianne Moore plays a mother who has lost her son; her grief is almost overwhelming. She has an obsessive attachment to any mementos or records of her child. But such mementos keep going missing or mysteriously changing. Then she is told by her husband and her shrink that she has imagined the whole thing — the son himself, the terrible accident that ended his life, everything. Of course she is outraged and heads off in search of the truth.
Moore, as one expects, is very good indeed — she is always good when she is given something to do, especially if that something is emotional. Take, for instance, Hannibal, Ridley Scott’s addition to the corpus on the cannibal killer. There, Moore was not given enough psychological stuff to work with, and the film consequently lacked an emotional core or anything to care about (Anthony Hopkins’s expert hamming was no substitute). Compare that with Moore’s indubitable triumph in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, which was all emotion — and in which Moore not only carried the movie but lifted it right into the stratosphere.
What’s weird about The Forgotten is that it starts out in emotional mode — the grieving mom, sitting mournfully on a kids’ swing, while James Horner’s score plangently tells us what she is feeling and what we are supposed to feel. Horner is a past master at loud emotional manipulation. So we think we’re in for tear-jerking drama. But, as it goes on, the movie becomes more and more like Hannibal — slick, fast, scary, but progressively emptied of any meaningful emotional contact.
Not that Moore doesn’t keep trying to inject the movie with emotional content. She is, however, fighting a losing battle. We never cease to believe in her and the absolutely convincing nature of her grief, but the plot steadily undermines her dramatic efforts. Narrative twists and sudden surprises provide a quicker, sharper route to the viewer’s nervous responses, and these rather numb one to the underlying feelings Moore is trying to convey. By the end of the movie, one feels as though a bunch of hocus-pocus has colonised and displaced the real human matter.
In sum, it’s hard to either recommend The Forgotten, or to trash it completely and advise you to avoid. There are good things in it — a great central performance, and an intriguing genre-b(l)ending plot. They just don’t seem to add up, or work together, to make a coherent, satisfying whole.