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Mr.

Nobody
by Mike D'Angelo
One of the most mind-warping theories about quantum mechanics, first proposed by
Hugh Everett in 1957 and taken seriously by physicists to this day, is known as
the many-worlds hypothesis. Ludicrously simplified, the idea is that our univer
se is continually splitting into parallel universes at branch points representin
g different possible outcomes. In our universe, Barack Obama is the president of
the United States, but a chance quantum fluctuation might have caused a ray of
sunlight to fall in a different spot back in 2007, which might have caught Obama s
eye and might have inspired a train of thought that would have resulted in his
deciding not to run for president. And since those things could have happened, t
he many-worlds theory believed by some scientists to be literally true, not just a
wacky thought experiment insists that there must be another universe in which the
y did happen. The same applies to every person on the planet, however lowly, and
every decision, however seemingly insignificant.
Belgian filmmaker Jaco Van Dormael knows all about the many-worlds hypothesis, w
hich implicitly informs his best-known movie, 1991 s Toto The Hero, and is the exp
licit motor for his long-delayed third feature, Mr. Nobody. (The film premired at
the 2009 Venice Film Festival, but is only now getting a U.S. release.) Its pro
tagonist, Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto), even works, in one of his many incarnations,
as the onscreen narrator of a pop-science TV program, helpfully explaining such
heady ideas as string theory and the possibility that time actually moves in mo
re than the single direction we perceive. In many ways, Mr. Nobody functions as
a big-budget ($47 million huge by European standards), English-language remake of
Toto, expanding on the earlier film s notion of an elderly man looking back on the
multitude of possible lives he s led. Other movies, like Sliding Doors and Krzysz
tof Kieslowski s Blind Chance, have explored similar ideas, but Van Dormael pushes
the conceit close to its breaking point, depicting parallel-lives-within-lives.
For some reason, there s always a train involved in these stories, which the main
character alternately catches or misses, sending him/her in wildly different dir
ections. At age 9, Nemo (played as a boy by Thomas Byrne) improbably has to choo
se between his divorcing parents (Rhys Ifans and Natasha Little) on a station pl
atform, as Mom heads out of town; he hesitates, then chases after her, but both
is and isn t slowed down by a faulty shoelace, and hence grows up with both his mo
ther and his father. In the mom-dominated universe, Nemo falls in love as a teen
ager with his stepsister, Anna (Juno Temple, who was still fairly unknown when t
he movie was made; the character is played by Diane Kruger as an adult), but the
ir tryst is short-lived, as the older couple splits up and Anna moves away. In t
he dad-dominated universe, Nemo is barely on nodding terms with Anna, and winds
up marrying Elise (Clare Stone as a teenager, Sarah Polley as an adult), who is
either killed by an explosion right after their wedding or lives to become a man
ically depressed basket case who makes Nemo s life hell. There s also a third possib
le wife, Jean (Audrey Giacomini as a teenager, Linh-Dan Pham as an adult), for w
hom Nemo feels nothing whatsoever, latching onto her at random in yet another un
iverse where Elisa spurns him in high school. Plus a universe in which Nemo has
a motorcycle accident and spends years as a comatose vegetable. Oh, and it s also
2092, and Nemo is the last mortal human, about to celebrate his 118th birthday.
Believe it or not, that tortured synopsis barely scratches the surface of this i
nsanely ambitious movie, which leaps about at will among the above scenarios and
several more besides. Consequently, Van Dormael has difficulty fashioning Nemo,
with his panoply of existences, into somebody whose ultimate or actual or ideal
fate is worth caring about as more than a complex intellectual exercise. (Leto
isn t a particularly expressive actor, which doesn t help matters; his teenage count
erpart, Toby Regbo, does most of the heavy lifting for the character.) While mos
t of the alternate paths branch backward to that agonizing moment when Nemo had
to choose which parent to live with an impossible demand to place upon a child, as
the Iranian drama A Separation made so devastatingly clear there s no real weight t
o the dilemma as it s depicted here, where it s part of a nonstop onslaught of whatifs. The broken shoelace was a chance event (he chooses his mother in both unive

rses, albeit at the last second), and even if the film is scientifically accurat
e in its suggestion that free will is illusory, that doesn t negate the dramatic f
rustration involved in watching a hapless hero buffeted about by quantum uncerta
inty. A late-breaking twist (involving yet another universe, in which everyone w
ears ugly argyle sweater vests for some reason) offers a way out of this emotion
al cul-de-sac, but by that point, most viewers will have settled into a state of
detached admiration. In the end, Mr. Nobody s title is simply too apt.

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