Last night we attended the NY premier of Ken Watanabe’s Memories of Tomorrow featuring a Q&A session with the man himself. Watanabe-san both produced and starred in this film about a middle aged ad exec who struggles with the onset of Alzheimers. We watch as the illness erodes all aspects of his life as quickly, or slowly depending on your perspective, as he loses his mental capacity. The film runs about two hours, and while it took a while to connect with the characters due to the slow pace of the film, by the time you develop a sympathy for them, you realize that the pacing of the film indirectly conveys one of the cruel aspects of Alzheimers- that nothing much appears to be happening on the surface, but you are slowly being overcome without knowing it. This film had some terrific acting by Watanabe and Kanako Higuchi who played the devoted, loving wife whose battle to cope was in many ways even harder than that of Watanabe’s character.

During the Q&A, Watanabe-san talked about how this story was dear to him because his own experience battling Leukemia 20 years ago gave him a lot to draw from. He talked about how some of the scenes were difficult for him as an actor, like the blank expression he had to portray while his wife was an emotional wreck, yet other scenes came naturally, like being able to cry through 20 takes of the speech scene at his daughter’s wedding. This dude is certainly a great actor. Hard to believe he was the same guy as the badass samurai lord from The Last Samurai. For those of you who go waaaay back, he was also in one of my favorite movies of all time, Tampopo, as the young sidekick partner to the lead truck driving gourmet. (That tidbit of info usually elicits the same response from people as when you tell them that Vince Vaughn was the guy in Rudy that got demoted to the scout team after berating Rudy for practicing too hard.) I haven’t seen Letters from Iwo Jima but I heard that was a good flick too. Anyway, Memories of Tomorrow was a well made film and definitely worth seeing, but certainly not something I could see twice. By the time the credits were rolling I was thoroughly depressed. Job well done, Mr. Watanabe.