MOSAIC Review: Memory's a Pain

Olivia Lake’s soul is isolated. She drinks too much. She has spent a lifetime bouncing from one suitor to another without ever really caring about any of them. She’s bitter that she’s only had one great creative idea in her career as a children’s book author, but she cherishes the joy it’s brought to two generations of children—that joy is the only thing that makes her feel like she’s lived a worthwhile life. She milks the one good thing she’s done for all it’s worth, which is apparently a lot if her estate in the snow-coated mountains of western Utah is any indication.

Photo credit: Mosaic/IMDb

That estate makes her attractive to grifters, to hangers on, to anyone who exists solely to take, take, take. Eventually, one of those takers grabs everything he can from her, and then she’s dead, leaving behind a light (but impactful) artistic legacy—and a byzantine mystery.

A Different Kind of Noir

What’s wildest about director Steven Soderbergh and writer Ed Solomon’s experimental app (you can watch via the App Store and Google Play, and in miniseries format on HBO) isn’t its “choose your own adventure” structure, but rather the woman at its center.

Olivia Lake is a person with regrets, hopes, fleeting happinesses and elongated melancholic spells. After all, you don’t hire Sharon Stone to play a nothing part, which is what Olivia Lake would be in a film. She would be a victim whose death would be the inciting incident for an investigation conducted by the “important” characters. But in Mosaic, we spend about two solid hours with Olivia. She’s no McGuffin; she is someone whose personality is so large and important that it has its own gravitational pull.

This creates a different kind of value system than would exist in a neo-noir film that follows the same story.

When Your (Forgotten) Past Doesn't Match Your Values

The Joel of the modern day trusts his instincts. He’s sure of himself. He works hard, gives swamp tours to tourists in the Deep South, and sits on a wood porch with his wife on his lap. He’s a good man, the type of neighbor you point to and say, “That guy’s got it together.” He repeats this vision of himself throughout Mosaic—but the vision begins to blur, crack, and fall apart entirely as new evidence presents itself about his past.

Four years earlier, Joel (Garrett Hedlund) was a different guy—a bearded, surly, bloated, drunken aspiring artist—and he lived on Olivia Lake’s Utah property at the time of her murder.

And thus, Soderbergh (who serves as his own editor and cinematographer) and Solomon begin to pick away at Joel’s sanity—and the audience’s perception of truth. Joel is recruited by Olivia’s would-be sister-in-law, Petra (Jennifer Ferrin), to help solve the case of what really happened the night the famed author met her end—and landed Petra’s con artist brother Eric (Frederick Weller) in jail for the murder of his fiancée. Through this investigation, Joel’s hazy memories of that night (made blurrier by a mix of whiskey and beer) begin to return to him—and he doesn’t trust himself anymore.

With a fuzzy dimness hanging over the lens of his digital camera, Soderbergh takes us through the process by which a person can put details about themselves that they don’t like out of their mind. Through a series of close-ups and jump cuts, Soderbergh shatters Joel’s mindset. Hedlund’s pained and worried expressions and harried voiceover turn Joel into a desperate man, one who must cover his tracks—or, at least, he thinks he has to cover his tracks. Regardless, he’s paranoid.

When you act paranoid, you look guilty.

And when you look guilty, well, that’s no good, especially during a recently reopened murder investigation.

Responsibility Over Relationships

Joel has one good thing going for him as he returns to Summit, Utah, for the first time since Olivia’s murder: His buddy Nate (Devin Ratray) is the lead detective on the case. Nate’s the ultimate pushover type—overweight, not classically handsome, shy, eager to get out of the way of “take charge” types.

Ratray makes Nate a hodgepodge of nervous tics. He draws out syllables in his words as if he can’t figure out if this is the right word he wants to use, he doesn’t swear (the worst thing to come out of his mouth is a frustrated, “Oh, gosh darn it!”), he’s totally deferential to everyone, and he’s always terrified that he’s “being untruthful”—to the case, to the media, to his wife, to his person-of-interest friend.

But Nate’s also a really, really good cop who makes connections and hunts them down with a tenacity nobody else could muster. It hurts him that his friend may have done such a grisly thing, but he lets the facts lead him.

Similarly, Petra doesn’t let her painful relationships—with her brother Eric, with Olivia—get in the way of trying to find justice. She has avoided her brother all their lives because of his profession (he’s a high-level con artist, and thus mega suspicious and easily jailable) and she couldn’t stand the woman who would have been her sister had things gone differently. They aren’t why she involves herself in this “new project,” as Eric puts it derisively from behind bars.

The partnership Petra builds with Nate is founded on getting it right, even if her possibly innocent brother deserves a more cosmic form of justice and the possibly guilty Joel has seemingly redeemed himself to become a productive member of society. Perhaps, Mosaic ponders, it would be best to leave this situation be, but would that be justice? Would it be proper even if it’s not factually right? Shouldn’t a lifetime of bad behavior go punished? Should one potential mistake be weighed against an otherwise upstanding life?

This gnaws at every character on the screen and theoretically every viewer watching. As the miniseries reaches its midsection, Soderbergh’s editing takes on a frenzied quality. He toggles between different takes of conversations—from one perspective everything may seem cordial and from another perspective one conversationalist may be swinging his arms in a fit of rage—to play with perception, with vantage points, with what truth is for different individuals.

The series becomes purposely frustrating in its various twists, which brings the investigation to ski resorts, silver mines, NCAA March Madness, the high-end art world of the Utah mountains, and plenty of other red herrings and dead ends (or are they?). Much like the detective novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett that so inspired this tale of deceit and murder, Soderbergh and Solomon aren’t keen on giving you the exact details of what exactly happened.

Instead, they leave us with questions about the malleability (and fallibility) of human memory, and how one’s neurotic imagination can impact on those memories. Perhaps they want us to wonder the same thing Olivia wondered in an early flirtation with her live-in employee, Joel:

“Everybody’s got imagination. Everyone’s got their own influences. My question to you is, what’s your own special take on it?”

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Writer: Ed Solomon

Starring: Sharon Stone, Devin Ratray, Garrett Hedlund, Frederick Weller, James Ransone, Paul Reubens

Available now on HBO Now, HBO Go, and in app form