Memoria perdida

Alan Alda's warmth and authenticism keeps this otherwise too gullible, naïve and simplified film about the loss of one's mental capacity at a watchable level - for a while. Both Alda's character, an ageing Alzheimer victim, and his nephew (Matthew Broderick) suffering from memory loss after a head injury, are interesting characters, but director Terry Kinney (of the Steppenwolf Theatre) doesn't give them more than a third of a film to develop and batter each other, to use a term fitting the remaining plot of Diminished Capacity, which is centered around baseball memorabilia - and in the goofiest possible manner. Alda, thinking he has a valuable vintage baseball card, takes Broderick and his stock love interest Charlotte (Virginia Madsen) to a memorabilia expo in Chicago, and after that, it all goes haywire. The comedy is forced and badly timed, and the film struggles to retain the truthful string it seemed to have created early in. In the end, the film has little more to offer than a frenzy of badly drawn supporting characters and more or less ridiculous complications.