A Wild-Eyed and Sleep Deprived Ray Liotta is Addicted to Shooting Up Memories in John Dahl's Disappointing 1996 Science-Fiction Noir Unforgettable
Ray Liotta enjoyed a fine career, as evidenced by the outpouring of grief that greeted his untimely recent death at 67. But I can’t help but think about all the amazing films he would have made if he had started acting in films in the late 1960s and 1970s.
During the heyday of New Hollywood the renegade filmmakers of the day would have made fine use of two of Liotta’s trademarks: unnerving intensity and coked-out delirium.
Liotta conveyed the world-weary, bone-deep exhaustion of someone who hasn’t slept in days, if not weeks, and was on the verge of breaking down completely not just in the final act of Goodfellas but throughout his career as well.
John Dahl’s deeply frustrating 1996 genre-hopping horror-noir-science fiction muddle Unforgettable makes savvy use of the coked-out danger and raw despair at the center of Liotta’s persona.
Liotta’s sad-eyed Dr. David Krane spends Unforgettable with the wild-eyed gleam of someone who has spent long, agonizing days wired on a powerful stimulant that has pushed his heart and his mind to the point of madness and beyond.
He’s a tragic figure who lives his life on the knife’s edge of life and death, not unlike Nicolas Cage’s haunted, sleep-deprived paramedic in Bringing Out the Dead.
A lot of movies cast Liotta because he was a great actor and right for the part but also because he was the star of Goodfellas, and consequently a preeminent gangster movie icon. Unforgettable also seemingly cast Liotta because of Goodfellas, but only because he spends so much of it exhausted, paranoid and drugged out of his mind.
The twist is that the mind-altering, dangerous and addictive entity that David is shooting into his veins isn’t cocaine or crystal meth but rather the traumatic memories of the people involved in his wife’s murder.
As is often the case, the husband was the first and primary suspect. David was proven innocent in a court of law, albeit in a way that left people skeptical of his actual innocence.
That’s another way in which Liotta’s casting is on target. He definitely seems like someone who could have murdered somebody with his bare hands in a fit of rage.
That edge of danger, rage and madness helps explain why Liotta’s time as a name above the title leading man in theatrically released films was relatively short lived and limited to the 1990s.
Like Eric Roberts, Liotta seems like he definitely might have killed multiple people while on drugs or in some manner of psychotic rage, and it can be difficult to buy an actor with that energy as a romantic leading man or loving dad.
When Unbreakable came out I was a big fan of its director John Dahl. I remember stumbling upon his 1989 debut Kill Me Again on HBO and being blown away. I experienced a wonderful sense of discovery, of having found a filmmaker with a voice and a sense of style that was at once old-fashioned and fresh.
Kill Me Again was followed by 1993’s Red Rock West, another nifty sleeper I saw on cable and was blown away by. Red Rock West proved too good for the cable movie ghetto and received a modest theatrical release that helped establish its writer-director’s growing reputation as a contemporary master of Neo-noir.
But Dahl didn’t achieve his big mainstream breakthrough until his next film, another steamy Neo-noir with a star-making turn from Linda Fiorentino that similarly debuted on HBO but received a theatrical release on account of being way too fucking good to be relegated to pay cable.
Unforgettable was Dahl’s 1996 follow-up, a big budget studio film that, unlike Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, opened in theaters. Unlike those over-achieving sleepers, however, Unforgettable was poorly received, got dreadful reviews and bombed at the box-office.
That’s not terribly surprising considering that they couldn’t convince me, a fan of John Dahl and Ray Liotta, to see it at a stage in my life when I pretty much saw everything.
Unforgettable is, ironically, a very forgettable title for a thriller. The studio did a terrible job marketing Unforgettable because it’s a tough sell with a convoluted and ultimately very silly premise that it ultimately does not transcend.
In Unforgettable Liotta plays a sad-eyed, deeply depressed widower and single father who works as a medical examiner in Seattle. While investigating a crime scene one night he sees a clue that leads him to think that the murder might be related to his wife’s killing.
At a dinner the doctor discovers that the brilliant Dr. Martha Briggs (Linda Fiorentino) has discovered a way to transfer memories through spinal fluid. In a fit of desperation David breaks into Briggs’ lab and shoots himself up with his dead’s wife’s memory.
When David injects himself with someone else’s memories he re-lives them on a physical as well as mental level. He retains the muscle memory as well as the psychological sensation. That means that he acts out what he’s feeling in a vacuum, outside the original context.
It’s like posthumous party animal Bernie from the Weekend at Bernie’s duology by way of David Cronenberg.
If that sounds more than a little ridiculous, that’s because it is. It’s one of the many elements of the film that should be unintentionally funny but are not due to the craft and artistry Dahl and Liotta bring to what is ultimately a very preposterous picture.
Dahl puts his distinctive stamp on Unforgettable, investing the material with the same dark stylization as his earlier, more successful outings. We’re unmistakably in the world of Noir, a bleak realm full of death and suffering, sadness and betrayal.
Unforgettable looks fantastic and boasts a characteristically committed lead performance by Liotta. As he did so often over the course of his career, Liotta took something that sounds laughable on the page, like a sexual assault with a garden hose or eating your own brain, and made it feel real and raw.
But Unforgettable’s premise angrily demands an unreasonable level of suspension of disbelief without offering much of a reward. This is simply a screenplay that should not have made, with a premise that is unsustainable even in the hands of a master of Neo-noir like Dahl.
In a way, the film’s craftsmanship works against it. I’d almost rather see a crazy, bad movie that’s wildly histrionic and poorly acted but goofy fun than a movie that’s as good as a film with this script and this premise could possibly be but is still pretty bad.
Dahl has a real talent for crafting tight, efficient thrillers but Unforgettable lasts nearly two increasingly convoluted hours.
Unforgettable is a relative anomaly in Dahl’s filmography. Of the eight films he’s directed only two—this and the frustratingly generic war movie The Great Raid—are only out and out stinkers.
Despite that impressive track record as the director of Kill Me Again, Red Rock West, The Last Seduction, Rounders and Joyride, Dahl has not directed a feature film since the sly 2007 dark comedy You Kill Me.
Dahl has 62 directorial credits on IMDB and has been working non stop in television but I think his formidable gifts would be better employed writing and directing another big screen Neo-Noir than grinding out a living directing shows like Californication.
As Liotta’s untimely passing illustrates, we never know when it will be too late to give favorite artists a chance to do what they do best for the best, most receptive possible audience.
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