Keanu (pt. III): Keanusgiving

Johnny Mnemonic

Sweet November

Warmest welcomes, dear readers. This is the time of year when families and friends get together, everyone fucks off at work, and an odd, slugglish languor creeps in that makes it impossible to do anything but eat and (hopefully) watch movies. Movies are the perfect way to get out of talking to your family, and it often helps when that movie provides plenty of perplexing, fodder-inducing moments. I would like to offer a selection of bizarre and silly cinema to give you solace from the constant of Thanksgiving—fighting with your family—with a double feature brought to you by a constant of Double Feature Thursday—Keanu Reeves. Keanu has appeared in five different films explored on this blog, and has probably been referenced several other times because I just can’t get enough of this bodacious brunette bro. From Ted of Bill and Ted, to John Wick of John Wick, no matter what role he’s occupying, Keanu approaches it with sincerity and passion and an unshakable likability. His voice, his smile, his history of being a good person, always puts me at ease. I can’t guarantee that your Thanksgiving will be peaceful, but I can guarantee the peaceful quality of a full-throttle, full-ridiculous Keanu Reeves film, so let’s begin with the better of tonight’s two features: Robert Longo’s under-appreciated cyberpunk adventure from 1995, Johnny Mnemonic. Based off of William Gibson’s 1981 short story of the same name, Johnny Mnemonic drops us into the year 2021, where our world has become a techno-nightmare of a corporation-controlled dystopia. (Not too far off but also 2021 feels like a quaint and quiet time at this present moment in time.) The world is dependent upon the internet and technology, but it has plagued much of society with a degenerative disorder called “nerve attenuation syndrome” that further fuels the class divide, and threatens the safety and the sanity of all of humanity. Johnny Mnemonic pictures Keanu as a “mnemonic courier” who transports sensitive data in a chip stored inside his brain to and from these megacorporations. When Johnny travels to Beijing to take on a job from some rogue scientists, he is suspicious, but willingly uploads the data into his hard drive of a head. But this data not only exceeds the memory space in his brain, which—if left in too long—will cause severe brain damage, it prompts the leader of the yakuza to come after him to destroy that information—and Johnny. Keanu is no stranger to techno-horrific, fatalistic futures, but Johnny Mnemonic had a distinctly different and delightfully old school quality to it. It was missing all of the sleekness and chicness of The Matrix, and instead leaned into its wacky, colorful, digital aesthetic, which I loved. I always love the way that “older” movies imagine the future, because you can only ever work with the technology that exists at that time, so you get a bit of the new and the old—like human beings as flash drives but also fax machines and VCRs. As cheesy and static-y as the effects of this virtual reality were, it all felt creative and expansive and consistently cyberpunk, in a way that must’ve inspired the Cyberpunk 2077 video game in which Keanu does a voice. More than the effects, what sold this film’s sense of world-building were the scrappy, quippy characters and the stakes set out before them. Udo Kier and his non-binary Grace Jones-painted paramours, Ice-T and his band of bohemian-techno-bandits, Dolph Lundgren as a street-preaching psycho-cultist, and Henry Rollins as a punk doctor named Spider all just made sense and fit correctly here. Also, at the risk of sounding super offensive, I didn’t know Dolph Lundgren could actually act and deliver a performance like this one but he was effectively terrifying. Everyone really delivered in Johnny Mnemonic, and I’m not just talking about the sensitive info Keanu is tasked with delivering. The story is surprisingly riveting, the production design is captivating and fun, and it provided me with one of my favorite things in cinema, which is very goofy dialogue delivered by soft-shouting, exasperated Keanu Reeves—such as “I’m supposed to be in that city over there, I want room service, I want the club sandwich and a Mexican beer and a $10,000 a night hooker!” It is a hilarious, hypnotic, hyperbolic imagining of a world we’re already living in, with a version of the internet and level of violence that is just too 90s to believe. It may have been too ambitious for the time and the limited effects that were available, but I appreciate films that can fully immerse you into its wild, wild west and make you say “why haven’t more people seen this?” One film I won’t be directing that question toward is Pat O’Connor’s 2001 film Sweet November. I will try my best to keep this film’s synopsis short and spoiler-free but this odd rom-com-dram is far more absurd and challenging to wrap one’s head around than Johnny Mnemonic. Sweet November, based off of the the 1968 film of the same name, follows Keanu as my least favorite of the 90s male archetypes (the early 2000s, as we all know, was still basically the 90s): the uptight, overworked businessman. I haven’t had to endure Keanu as an asshole since The Devil’s Advocate (perhaps one of the worst films I’ve watched for this blog) and I never want to be put in a position where I hate this man, and yet that is what Sweet November insisted upon. Keanu plays an advertising big-wig named Nelson Moss, who’s addicted to work and neglecting his girlfriend (Lauren Graham). He wakes up everyday in his minimalistic high-rise at 7am (and acts like that’s that early), turns on his ten TVs, goes to work, bosses around his coworker Vince (Greg Germann), and makes deals deals deals. But his life is turned upside down when he’s forced to take an afternoon off to renew his license at the DMV, and encounters a manic pixie dreamgirl by the name of Sara (Charlize Theron, his love interest in The Devil’s Advocate… why did they keep making bad movies together?) When I first witnessed Charlize with her short hair, thin brows, and jarringly-cringe tendencies, I felt war flashbacks to Winona Ryder’s tragic character in Autumn in New York. But Sweet November was committed to more than just tragedy, it was determined to place my jaw on the floor and keep it there. Essentially, in their extremely brief meeting, Sara gathers the fact that Nelson is an impatient, rude, entitled business dude who could probably stand to take some time off and work on himself, and when he is fired from his job and dumped by his girlfriend (who I think utters three words in this whole movie) he is forced to take this stranger’s advice. Well, what actually happens is that Nelson tries to cheat on his written driving test, but Sara gets in trouble and can’t renew her license, so she proposes that he shlep her around where she needs to go. Which, would be a strange enough premise on its own. But after a couple of carpool sessions, Sara hatches another plan: since Keanu is on a forced vacation anyway, he should come live with her for the month of November so she can help him become a better person. Sara declares, after mere days of knowing each other, “If you’re brave enough, I will commit myself entirely to you”, which, to be fair, I would also say to Keanu if I had the chance, but it is an objectively insane thing to say. And Nelson is rightfully confused and put-off by this idea, even when they sleep together and build a legitimate chemistry—which Keanu is incapable of avoiding with any costar, regardless of gender. There are moments when Sweet November is clearly confident in its ludicrousness, and other moments where Keanu acts as the mouthpiece for the audience and questions the bewildering situation he’s found himself in, saying things like “I don’t understand you, this whole thing” to which Charlize says “You don’t need to understand me, just let it happen.” Things only get more puzzling when Jason Isaacs shows up to Charlize’s house and says to Keanu “Ah, you must be November.” It makes sense to this confounded viewer that Keanu would then question if this is “some kind of communal culty sneaky Charlie thing”, but then he would be right back to accepting his new, free-spirited reality that is seemingly devoid of all responsibility beyond learning to be a gentle lover and person. Everything about that scenario should work, and even if it’s not perfect, this film’s bizarre premise initially sold me on its potential for sexiness. But not only was Sweet November not sexy, it was hardly romantic. It stumbled its way through fights and makeups and dissatisfying resolutions to unpredictably inane problems. That’s the one thing I will give Sweet November—with its half-baked humor, heavy use of Enya, and Michael Rosenbaum in drag AGAIN, it was impossible to predict this movie. But then, just when I thought Sweet November at least had uniqueness on its side, it implemented an unnecessary tragedy that I feared and sensed was coming the whole time, but I desperately wanted to be wrong about. I was reluctantly won over by Sweet November’s daring ability to make both attractive leads undesirable, and making them say things like “That old couple who owns the bookstore used to be friends with Jack Kerouac” “I don’t care, I don’t read.” But it ultimately lost me when it decided to be just like every other sappy, silly, Fall film that came before it. I can’t even say how I definitively feel about this film, because I’m currently still processing all of the nonsense that I witnessed, but I will say that as cringe and clunky of a story as this was, Keanu couldn’t help being charming and funny and sympathetic. It takes a lot of talent to make me dislike a movie with Keanu Reeves in it, but this one really tried its darnedest. Thank you, dear reader, for reading along this week and, hopefully, making a pitstop from the chaos of Thanksgiving to discover some films that might just make you realize how much worse your reality can be. Gobble gobble!