A pandemic of lost memory

 Little Fish is the second movie I've seen this year that deals with a pandemic in which memory loss becomes rampant. Apples, a Greek movie that traveled the fall festival circuit, took place in Athens where many people were being struck by amnesia. Director Christos Nikou took a more complex view of memory loss than Little Fish director Chad Hartigan, who works in a more familiar key. Hartigan builds his story around a romance between newlyweds played by Olivia Cooke and Jack O'Connell. What begins as a conventional romance takes a strange turn when O'Connell's Jude begins to lose his memory. He's not the only one. What the movie calls Neuroinflammatory Affliction (NIA) has caused widespread memory loss. Much of the story involves efforts by Cooke's Emma to keep O'Connell's Jude from vanishing into a forgetful haze. A question arises: Is it possible to sustain a relationship when memory begins to vanish? The movie retreats from the question when it slips into romantic mode and a subplot involving a possible corrective program by a research outfit doesn't really go anywhere. Cooke and O'Connell make an appealing couple and we seldom feel deprived by the lack of an explanation for the disorder that's sweeping the globe. Obviously, the sense of disconnection from the familiar jibes well with the current Covid 19 environment. Although the movie can be a bit bland, I doubt whether many viewers will be disappointed that Little Fish plays more like romance than speculative sci-fi, flirting with larger questions as Emma and Jude try to hold onto each other and themselves.

An American kid in Heidelberg

Adolescence inevitably seems to immerse young people in alien territory in which they can feel awkward, uncertain and confused.

In Morris From America, the ordinary problems of a dawning adolescence are amplified in ways that make for an illuminating movie with plenty of heart. Morris (a winning Markees Christmas), you see, is a black American kid living in Heidelberg, Germany, with his widowed father (Craig Robinson). Dad works as a coach with the local professional soccer team.

So what's life like for a 13-year-old who'd rather be back in the States?

Well, the kids at a local recreation center keep asking Morris whether he's a rapper or a basketball player? When drugs turn up at the center, a counselor immediately and wrongly accuses Morris. Even a 15-year-old (Lina Keller) who seems to accept Morris as a friend can't resist playing a cruel joke on him at a party.

Put another way, Morris faces racism that derives from stereotypes that have little to do with anything in his reality.

To make a movie such as this, director Chad Hartigan had to find just the right kid to play Morris. Chunky and reticent, Christmas gives a performance to which we slowly warm. By the end, he has entirely won us over as a young man forced to play the role of the stranger.

Much of the time Morris is on his own. He meets with the young woman (Carla Juri) who has been hired to tutor him in German or tries to stave off loneliness. He attempts to deal with a misguided crush on Keller's Katrin, who has an older boyfriend and who runs on a faster track than Morris can handle.

The heart of the movie beats around a father-son relationship. Familiar from such comedies as Hot Tub Time Machine, Pineapple Express and This Is The End, Robinson portrays a loving father who battles his own loneliness. He alternates between seeing his son as a companion and peer and as a kid who needs an authority figure in his life.

Robinson plays this character with a level of honest awareness that seems as real as the defenses Morris has developed to cope with this alien world.

As directed by Hartigan (This Is Martin Bonner), Morris From America becomes a sweet and knowing movie about a kid who must learn how to navigate a foreign society -- even if he'll never fully accept that society or be accepted by it.