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Once in a great while I see a movie that I wish would never end. Maybe because there is not a huge emotional climax that leaves me wrung out and sad, I feel as if the story could go on forever. The Final Cut, starring Robin Williams was one of these movies.
Here is the Netflix description of this 2004 movie, and it hardly does it justice:
"In this futuristic tale, chips inserted into the brain at birth record a person's entire life; when the person dies, the video is edited and shown at the funeral. Video editor Alan Hackman (Robin Williams) cuts out the worst of a person's life, depicting sinners as martyrs. Alan's turned into a cold megalomaniac, but things change when he finds his own scary childhood memory in the databank of a client. Mira Sorvino and Jim Caviezel also star."
I know, the name Robin Williams brings visions of wise-cracking ad-libbing silliness in a movie, but in this one he played it straight, reserving his humor for between takes as we saw in the extra footage on the DVD we got from Netflix.
Contrary to seeing him as a 'cold megalomaniac' I thought Robin Williams's character was that of a present-day accountant or maybe funeral home employee - quiet and boring. He was haunted by the guilt from when a childhood playmate died from a fall. He may have been a megalomaniac, but he wasn't flaunting it or intimidating people, he looked lonely.
To my mind, the best sci-fi movies are played in familiar settings: the world looks like ours with just a few technological advancements that are integral to the plot. This time it was the idea that 25% of the human population, those who could afford it or whose parents took out loans, get these chips planted in the brains of their children before they are born, so their entire life including their birth is recorded.
When they die, the cutters, like Robin William's character, visit with the family to find out which events were significant, and come up with the edited two hour version, which is played at a "re-memory" funeral service. Naturally, the editing has to be done in order to condense a lifetime to a reasonable length of time, but it is also an opportunity to show the good parts of a life and leave out the bad. The cutters see it all, of course, but one of their basic requirements is that they do not have memory chips, so they aren't recording what they see of everyone else's life.
The plot revolves around a group of people being opposed to the memory chip concept because of the damage it does to the survivors' psyches, and want to get the one Robin Williams is working on that will expose what a bad idea it is. And Robin Williams finds out by accident that he has one of those chips; his parents died in a car accident before he was old enough to be told he had one.
One of the most fascinating things was to see a person at age 70 in the mirror brushing their teeth, and go backwards to age 21. I also liked that they were able to install video screens on tombstones so visitors to the graveyard could watch the movie of the life of the person buried there.
While watching the movie I thought about what I'd like to see again in my own past. Maybe it was this that made the so movie good for me: it made me think and use my imagination and it didn't manipulate my emotions.
I recommend renting the DVD if you can, because of the 'how the movie was made' extras. Omar Naim was the director of this movie and also wrote the screenplay. This is his only movie so far, but I hope he does more.
