Try to Remember: The Amnesia Trilogy. Part 1: WRECKED

"You should see the other guy!"

To Merriam-Webster Online, amnesia means the following:

am·ne·sia

noun \am-ˈnē-zhə\

1: loss of memory due usually to brain injury, shock, fatigue, repression, or illness
2: a gap in one's memory

But to film fans, amnesia means a surefire way to plunge a movie's main character into a tailspin of paranoia and suspense! For the next three weeks, starting today, I'll be spotlighting three amnesia-driven thrillers from three different decades. Let's kick things off with the newest of these films first, Wrecked, released earlier this year by IFC Midnight.

…You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile….

…You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
“Once in a Lifetime,” Talking Heads

Objects in the rear-view mirror may be more painful than they appear!

Those of you who’ve been reading TotED for a while know that I rarely blog about movies made after 1980, unless it’s a film that’s really set up housekeeping in my heart and gut. The only post-1980 films I’ve discussed in these pages were 1996’s Independence Day (for Team Bartilucci’s disaster film double-feature back in April), and 2007’s No Country for Old Men (as a birthday tribute to my late mom back in January, since we both loved the film). However, director Michael Greenspan’s 2011 psychological survival thriller Wrecked, starring my favorite contemporary actor, Oscar-winner Adrien Brody (for the fact-based 2003 drama The Pianist), is so compelling that I want to recommend it to all of you now—why wait? Besides, as dear friend and fellow blogger ClassicBecky said when I was a guest at our own Clara Fercovic’s wonderful blog Via Margutta 51: “You know I’m also a 13-year-old with a ponytail about Adrien!” Becky, you’re in good company, believe me! (Click here for my Via Margutta 51 guest appearance, including my anecdote about Adrien Brody’s kindness to my daughter and me at New York Comic Con 2010.) 

“Are we friends, George?” With friends like dead bank robbers, who needs enemies?

Not the kind of “rapid transit” our hero had in mind!

Splendor in the grass? Not so much.

If you thought you woke up on the wrong side of the bed today, just be grateful you’re not in Adrien Brody’s shoes as Wrecked’s unnamed protagonist. He wakes up to find himself the pain-racked sole survivor of a horrific car crash! (Nice touch: we see the red insides of our awakening protagonist’s eyelids before he actually opens his eyes.) The Man, as Brody is billed in the credits, is bloody and bruised, with his nose and his right leg broken. His knees are trapped under the dashboard of a silver-gray Chevy. All he can figure out about his location is that it’s somewhere in a huge, dense forest (played by the beautiful Pacific Northwest), including a raging river that momentarily buffets our startled hero about the rapids; bah, wilderness! Oh, and did I mention there’s a bloody corpse in the back seat, apparently buckled in, and the windshield has been smashed, very likely from yet another passenger being thrown through the glass? On top of that, it becomes increasingly clear that our man is suffering from a concussion, resulting in amnesia. Well, how did he get here? And how the hell can he get out of here, preferably alive?

Our guy has a much-needed laugh and epiphany: “I hate mint!”

Brody gives a tour de force performance as our emotionally and physically persecuted man. His organic acting style is perfect for Wrecked; he always comes across as if he’s living in the moment, never hamming it up. When his character is hurt onscreen, you find yourself hurting along with him amid the sheer loneliness and frustration of his surreal ordeal. It helps that Brody has always been especially good at acting with his eyes; you can really read the emotions in those silver-sage orbs of his. Frankly, I couldn’t help wincing and whimpering at our beleaguered protagonist’s every ache and pain as he tries to move and make sense of his nightmarish situation. (Just thank your lucky stars that this blog post didn’t consist solely of me constantly whimpering, “Oh, nooo! Poor Brody! Poor baby!” or “Ooooh, poor boo-boo Adrien!”)

...“Goner,” if he can’t get out of this fix!

Greenspan and newbie screenwriter Christopher Dodd really sweat the small details of our man’s ordeal. When he isn’t fading in and out of consciousness, he becomes so hungry that even a mint on the car floor looks good to him—and being unable to reach that mint has him as maddeningly frustrated as if he was grasping for gold in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The excellent work of Greenspan, Dodd, and Brody’s compelling performance truly makes you feel his world shrinking to the size of the car’s interior. And yet even in this dire situation, they manage to slip in nuggets of wry comedy relief. One of my favorite bits: our hero finds he’s able to start the car enough to hear its radio, and…well, you may never listen to Tiny Tim’s rendition of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” quite the same way ever again (presuming you can pry it out of your head at all!). Even our suffering hero manages to crack a smile! I’m guessing our guy stumbled across a Dr. Demento broadcast.

Oh, shoot! Bad man, or scared man?

Trail-mix-toting angel of mercy, or devilish hallucination?

Our hero’s physical condition improves bit by bit, and gradually he’s able to cobble together a makeshift splint for his injured leg. He also manages to find a couple of credit cards in the car, one with the name “Raymond Plazzy” embossed on it, the other sporting the name “George Weaver.” Too bad neither name rings a bell with our frustrated fella. He becomes grateful for little things, like managing to catch some rainwater to drink from the car’s ashtray (some of it splashes onto his face, too, cleaning him up a tad so we can see more of Brody’s angularly winsome punim). When he finds a cell phone later (which might be his, or might belong to the dead men), it doesn’t work, what with the deep woods location and later, his rapids ride. But at least he finds an OTC pain reliever in the wreckage to dull his considerable aches and pains. Greenspan and Dodd even went to the trouble of showing our full-bladdered protagonist *ahem* relieving himself during his forced captivity in the wrecked car. The promise of seeing more of Brody may intrigue those of us who are warm for Brody’s form as well as his fine acting, but sorry, folks, his bathroom break is only heard, not seen!

Desperation gives “money to burn” new meaning.

A boy and his possibly imaginary dog  

See, he’s a good boy! The dog’s cute, too!

Our hero’s odyssey gets odder when he spots an attractive brunette, played by Canadian actress Caroline Dhavernas, who played private eye Brody’s blonde Girl(friend) Friday in the 1950s-set docu-noir Hollywoodland, about Superman actor George Reeves’ mysterious death. Our man is so overcome with gratitude at seeing another human being—with a plastic bag of trail mix, no less—just feeling the woman’s face melts our man into tears of joy and relief, sobbing, “So warm. So warm.” The woman soothingly says, “Everything’s going to be all right now. I promise.” And then he wakes up! Aw, man! (Is it me, or does Brody’s face look like a tragedy mask when he cries? I’ve noticed that about him in other films, too, like The Pianist, The Jacket, and The Brothers Bloom. As far as I’m concerned, Brody’s still got a cute face even when he’s all sad and anguished, so there! But I digress….) Then a brown dog with a husky/shepherd build comes along. Is he a good dog? A bad dog? Or just another figment of our beleaguered, concussed protagonist’s imagination? The dog and the woman seem so real, only to periodically appear and disappear just when our guy thinks maybe he’s not hallucinating. Comfort and hope morph into despair, then back again. On top of that, the image of a frightened bank teller who looks like the woman flashes into our poor mixed-up guy’s mind. Is this what Nick Lowe, one of my favorite singer/songwriters, meant by “Cruel to be Kind”? Still, it’s nice to see Brody and Dhavernas together again onscreen. Judging from their chemistry in Hollywoodland, I wish they'd team up again onscreen, maybe for a more lighthearted movie, like a witty romantic comedy-thriller. (This is why Team Bartilucci needs to run the world! But again, I digress….)

“Ants on a log?” Would you settle for ants on a dashboard? Where’s Andrew Zimmern when you need him?

One day, our guy is cutting off the seat belts so he can use them to keep his makeshift splint in place. The radio broadcasts a news update about escaped bank robbers wanted in connection with the deaths of a female teller and a security guard. They were last seen in a silver-gray Chevy, and the bad men in question are named Eric Stapleton…and George Weaver…and Raymond Plazzy! When our fella manages to check the trunk, sure enough, there’s a whole bunch of money inside. But a man wearing hunting/survival gear and carrying a high-powered rifle apparently robs him and runs off. Is he another figment of our guy’s confused imagination and jigsaw memory? Is our hero in fact a villain? Yikes! Say it isn’t so! Say it’s just exhaustion and his scrambled memory messing with him. Or perhaps the filmmakers are messing with us? But one thing’s for sure: Wrecked sure keeps us viewers on our toes! Life is too short for a terrific film like Wrecked to wait for years or even decades to earn its classic status—check it out on DVD and Blu-Ray now!

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ENDING SPOILERS!

In a final flashback sequence, our protagonist learns/remembers his name: Simon. Apparently the woman is either Simon’s wife or girlfriend. They’d had some kind of unspecified spat in their car, and then Simon went inside a store. When he came out, the woman was sitting on a bench waiting for him. He opens his mouth as if he’s about to apologize or explain whatever they were arguing about, but whatever it was went by the wayside after Simon is unlucky enough to get in the way of the escaping bank robbers, who promptly take him hostage, then burn rubber escaping while the horrified woman screams out Simon’s name. Eventually, on a mountain road, Simon manages to wrest the steering wheel away from the robbers, the car goes out of control, and you know the rest! Luckily, he's rescued by forest rangers. Simon asks about his dog, and the ranger says he didn't have one. (Wonder if he and his honey will get one once they get home?)

Cougar on the prowl, and we don’t mean Courtney Cox!

Go green: recycle dead homicidal bank robbers as cougar chow!

"Hi, hon, it's me, Simon. My captors are dead and I need a lift. Can you come to the middle of nowhere and get me? Thanks, you're the ginchiest!"

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Extra special bonus photos for those of you who'd rather see Adrien Brody looking happy and charming instead of miserable and disheveled:

Yes, this is a real dog!  Not the movie, smarty!

Photo taken in Central Park by Brody's renowned photographer mom Sylvia Plachy

Beyond the forest, nicely-groomed stubble!

Look at that winning smile!