Mr. Nobody: “Why am I me and not someone else?”
“If you never make a choice, anything is possible.”
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 universe is continually splitting into parallel universes at branch points representing different possible outcomes. In our universe, where we make choices of our own, but a chance that quantum fluctuation might have caused a ray of sunlight to fall in a different spot in 2019, which might have caught my eye and inspired a train of thought that would have resulted in not making that very choice. And since those things could have happened, the 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 they did happen.
Belgian filmmaker Jaco Van Dormael knows all about the many-worlds hypothesis, which implicitly informs his best-known movie, 1991’s Toto The Hero, and is the explicit motor for his long-delayed work, Mr. Nobody. Its protagonist, Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto), even worked, in one of his many incarnations, as the on-screen narrator of a pop-science TV program, helpfully explaining such heady ideas as string theory and the possibility that time actually moves in more than the single direction we perceive. In many ways, Mr. Nobody functions as a big-budget, 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. Van Dormael does push the conceit close to its breaking point, depicting parallel-lives-within-lives.
Consequently, Van Dormael has difficulty fashioning Nemo, with his discrete existences, into somebody whose ultimate or actual or ideal fate is worth caring about as more than a complex intellectual exercise. While most 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 — there’s no real weight to the dilemma as it’s depicted here, where it’s part of a nonstop onslaught of what-ifs. The broken shoelace was a chance event (he chooses his mother in both universes, albeit at the last second), and even if the film is scientifically accurate in its suggestion that free will is illusory, that doesn’t negate the dramatic frustration involved in watching a hapless hero buffeted about by quantum uncertainty. A late-breaking twist (involving yet another universe, in which everyone wears ugly argyle sweater vests for some reason) offers a way out of this emotional dead end, 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.
