Jaco Van Dormael, best known for his much-loved 1991 film "Toto the Hero," returns to the big screen in Japan after 14 years with his comeback film, "Mr. Nobody" — but all indications are he should have stayed in retirement. With "Mr. Nobody," director/screenwriter Van Dormael is indeed treading new ground; his innovation, unfortunately, is making a film that plays like channel surfing.
"Mr. Nobody" has a scrambled narrative of the currently fashionable type — imagine "Inception" crossed with "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" — but this is taken to such ridiculous extremes that it feels as if the director shot three separate films, chopped the resulting footage into little pieces and then spliced it all together randomly; you can sense the stories pulsing within this fractured structure, but good luck making sense of them.
We meet Mr. Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto, underneath the old man makeup) on his 118th birthday in the year 2092, but Nemo himself insists he's still only 34, and tells himself, "I've got to wake up!" Bang: Cue a cut into another reality, where he's much younger and married with kids. Bang: Cut to him again, same age, different haircut, and with another wife, another family. Bang, bang, bang: Cut to the future again, then back to his childhood, then to another childhood. Nemo remembers dying — three different times, including once on a space station travelling to Mars. He remembers different wives (Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger, Linh-Dan Phan), different versions of the same events, which seem to have occurred simultaneously. Are these the fantasies of a senile old man? Or does he have the ability to move forward and backward in time?