What’s most compelling, and touching, in “True Detective” are these elements of memory and time, how it moves on and stands still. Ali, especially, with the help of some crack makeup and hair people, is persuasive as Wayne across a span of 35 years, living in the present and in an incomplete past that is running away from him even as he runs toward it. (Perhaps because we meet him first as an old man, we are drawn immediately to his side.) When Wayne meets Amelia, in 1980, she’s teaching a Robert Penn Warren poem, “Tell Me a Story” to a high school class: “Make it a story of great distances and starlight. / The name of the story will be Time, / But you must not pronounce its name.” Later, in a waking dream, 1990 Amelia will ask 2015 Wayne, “Einstein said, ‘Past, present and future are all a stubbornly persistent illusion — and are you waking up to that illusion now that things fall apart?’ “
Source: latimes.com – Los Angeles Times