Mr. Nobody

Do you remember when non linear used to be a thing? When films such as Pulp Fiction were described as innovative for eschewing the more usual manner of plot progression. Today it's a reasonably standard narrative technique, to be found across the entire audio visual medium.

Well this is a bit of a new one. Not only non linear but also interdimension. It tells the story of a Mister Nemo Nobody, but rather than simply the things that happened within his life, it reveals many of the possible lives he could have been living. Paths and realities created and followed by the choices he has made, or not. Women he could have been with, deaths that might have happened. It skips joyfully between them all, as well as fantasies and dreams that he and his duplicates may have formed. It is in essence the story of the potential of a man.

And there isn't a correct path, as one would assume from such a thing. Each of his realities is grim and desperate in it's own way, but as his much older self says, each has value, each contains meaning. Each is true. This does make the film a bit relentless. We see so many of the awful things that might have happened to him (as an aside, I love the fact that there isn't vocabulary adequate to accurately describe what this film is doing), it's hard not to crave more than the scant few victories available across his entire potential existence, even if this was probably important to maintaining the idea of no single path being his one true life.

It's visually stunning, as is Jared Leto, which feels an odd thing to be saying of another chap but happens to be true, and contains so many ideas that I found myself wondering if this was all some incredibly charming physics lecture. Mixing science fiction and magic to portray it's premise, it's quite wonderful how quickly it increases in complexity as each choice generates a whole new life to have been lived and whole new choices to further expand. This does sadly slow down somewhat, but I guess again this was perhaps required in order to detail the major elements of some of his lives. If that's the correct term for them.

With so much going on it was rather inevitable that not all of it would be to my tastes, and there were sequences and strands that I found tedious or served to hinder the overall pace it had set, but I find it hard to seriously condemn such faults in what is a unique, fascinating and genuinely innovative piece of storytelling. I never knew where it was headed which these days is a rare and truly wonderful thing.