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Memory Matters

John Dahl can't remember
what made him a cult director

By Allen Barra

If you walk into Unforgettable with no expectations, you stand a good chance of being satisfied. It's a competent thriller with more surprises and less gratuitous violence than most recent thrillers. Director John Dahl reaches for and even attains a Brian De Palma-like flair that makes the absurdity of the plot less noticeable.

The story involves a police forensics expert, Dave Krane (Ray Liotta), who's searching for the killer of his wife. At a scientific function, he meets Dr. Martha Briggs (Linda Fiorentino), a neurobiologist who has found a way to transfer memory through cerebral spinal fluid. She sticks a needle into a rat and suddenly it has the memory of a previous rat--though how anyone can distinguish between the memory of one rat and another is a point I never quite got.

You've probably guessed what happens next: Krane swipes the formula, goes to the morgue and injects himself with his wife's spinal fluid so that he can see who the real killer was. It seems a lot less silly on screen than in print, but there's no sense nailing Unforgettable for plot implausibility; compared to thrillers like Seven or The Usual Suspects, it's practically socialist realism.

Unforgettable reunites Dahl with Fiorentino, the pair who made The Last Seduction into the great B movie of the 1990s. In that film (and in Dahl's Kill Me Again and Red Rock West), all the nuances seemed familiar from years of movie thrillers, but there was a surprise, a perverse spin, that produced a nasty, unsettling shock.

Unforgettable, however, is out of Dahl's genre (closer to science fiction, really). He seems handcuffed by the formulaic limitations of the material, and so does Fiorentino, who comes across as a guest star in a Ray Liotta movie--an odd situation considering that Liotta has never demonstrated that he has the power to carry an entire film and Fiorentino has.

In one early scene, Briggs flubs her way through a boring speech. It's an almost exact reversal of one of Fiorentino's scenes in Jade and raises the intriguing possibility that she's going to parody her recent screen image. But after the first 20 minutes, the movie has nothing more to do with her except as an appendage to Liotta's character. She's forced to chase Liotta around in a lab coat carrying a needle and looking anxious, and this is not what we come to the movies to see Linda Fiorentino do.

Unforgettable is the first of Dahl's films to get a major theatrical release, and after years of having to get by on critical support and word-of-mouth, he's earned his bigger budget. But if he could inject himself with some of that memory stuff, he'd see scenes from a dozen forgettable movies flashing in front of his eyes. Dahl should be creating memorable new scenes, not repeating old ones.

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Unforgettable (R; 111 min.), directed by John Dahl, written by Bill Geddie, photographed by Jeffrey Jur and starring Ray Liotta and Linda Fiorentino.


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