The Berkeley Beacon

Issue date: 10/14/04 Section: Arts and Entertainment

Robin Williams erases Patc Adams from his "rememory."

It is ironic that a film called The Final Cut would have editing problems; despite some thought-provoking ideas and low-key performances, Cut's story meanders and has too much going on at times.

The Final Cut takes place in the near future, and it takes many visual cues from Gattaca, adapting a futuristic look with shades of noir. The main difference is that Gattaca's society was much cleaner; despite electronic advances, the characters in Cut still ride on dingy city buses and the brownstones are falling apart.

The newest technology is a Zoe Chip, inserted into an unborn child's brain. From the moment of delivery, everything that person sees is recorded. When they die, services called "rememories" are held, a strange amalgam of funeral and film.

Before these services are held, the raw footage is given to a "cutter," an editor who uses family information and personal judgment to create a portrait of the deceased. The none-too-subtly named Alan Hakman (Robin Williams) is the best cutter in the business.

Williams is one of few actors in Hollywood who can pull off comedic and dramatic roles interchangeably. For a normally loud-mouthed comedian, he plays Hakman similar to his disturbed developer in One Hour Photo.

We get to see Hakman's work as he previews a "rememory" for a bereaved brother. What this customer does not get to see, however, is the fondly-favored brother beating his wife at age 35.

This Orwellian dilemma leads Hakman to liken himself to a "sin eater," the town outcast who would bear the burden of other's souls after death for a few coins. Hakman is indeed secluded; his only friends are fellow cutters, except for his shaky relationship with Delila (Mira Sorvino).

Since her 1995 Oscar win for Mighty Aphrodite, Sorvino's career has gone nowhere but downhill. Cut plunges her even further down, due to her "deer in the headlights" expressions and her insistence to read every line of dialogue as if it were the most important thing she ever said.

Hakman is given the important assignment to cut a rememory for Charles Bannister, a high-profile executive at Eye Tech, the company that produces the Zoe Chip. But he bites off a little bit more than he can chew, because the sins he has to "eat" for this job are quite shocking.

The disturbing secret that Hakman sees while cutting is tastefully shown. At this point, it would appear that Cut will explore the ramifications of this atrocious action-but it does not. Instead, it pushes aside this memory for another that Hakman sees, sending him on a journey to find a childhood friend.

First-time writer/director Omar Naim deserves credit for taking what could have been a simple murder mystery and elevating it to Hakman's personal odyssey towards absolution. But a "whodunit" would have been more engrossing; while Hakman searches for his buddy, I could not stop thinking about what was going to happen with Bannister and his family.

But if the plot does not grab you, the ideas of The Final Cut will. Would your college activities change if you knew that once you died, somebody would watch them? One example given in the film was a "wild child," who, upon learning about her Zoe Chip at 21, was suddenly "born again"... that is, until she jumped off a building, destroying the chip along with herself.

With debatable concepts like this, The Final Cut should have been a better film with more focus. But, if for nothing else, a fine performance by Williams make Cut "rememorable."

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