Remember feels
like it draws a lot of the same exploitative inspiration that Quentin Tarantino
draws from films of the 60s and 70s that focused on minority populations in
broadly stereotypical ways to convey a message of empowerment for those
communities. Tarantino most notably did
this with the revisionist history of Inglorious
Basterds and Django Unchained,
but Atom Egoyan’s Remember takes a
different tact, focusing its lens on a modern day Holocaust survivor with
Alzheimer’s. The violent premise of the
film borders on being offensive, but thankfully the film that surfaces has
enough by way of subtext and intrigue to make for a rather entertaining
experience.
Zev (Christopher Plummer, still performing well into is
eighties) is the aforementioned Survivor, and after the death of his wife, he
promises to assist his friend Max, a fellow nursing home resident, with an
important task. Max has been searching
for the German officer responsible for killing their families at Auschwitz, and
he has narrowed down the list of suspects to four German immigrants of
appropriate age, all named Rudy Kurlander.
Because Max is restrained to a wheelchair, he sends Zev out into the
world with a list of instructions to track down the right Rudy Kurlander and
kill him.
This film had a lot of potential to become a mockery of
those suffering from dementia, but thankfully Zev is portrayed respectfully and
sympathetically. He isn’t a man who
really wants to kill, but he feels obliged to in order to avenge his family,
and Max’s goading and the death of his wife are the impetus to make that
happen. Plummer does a pretty great job
of conveying a complexity in Zev that makes him more than a bumbling old
archetype. However, that doesn’t mean
the people around him don’t see him as one, either thinking him incompetent or
harmless due to his age, which is precisely why he is able to buy a gun, cross
the Canadian border without a passport, and even have his hidden weapon
discovered by a security guard without consequence or struggle. It’s a smart commentary on the assumptions
that people in authority will make when dealing with an unassuming white
octogenarian, even when he presents a clear danger to others.
But the film does have an issue of hiccupping its way to the
finish line, which is a shame given the short ninety minute runtime. It’s primarily a symptom to the Egoyan’s need
to redundantly hammer home the fact that Zev is forgetful. There are too many scenes of Zev waking up,
not knowing where he is, calling Max, and recovering enough memory to continue
on his journey. Given the character,
these revelatory moments make sense, but for the audience it quickly becomes
tiresome, redundant, and rarely offers any new insight or plot progression. Making note of constant amnesiac episodes is
fine, but dwelling on them for five to ten minutes at a time in order to pad
the film is excessive.
The film culminates in a tense encounter with the final Rudy
Kurlander that I won’t spoil, but I will say hinges upon a twist that I did
not see coming, though I knew one was inevitable given how memory loss is
generally handled in cinema. It’s a
fairly clever conclusion that proved some of my assumptions completely wrong,
which makes for a pretty nice cherry on top of a film that I feel comfortable
recommending. If it were longer, I would
likely find the somewhat redundant storytelling a bit more tedious, but there’s
enough tension and social commentary held up by a pretty good lead performance
to make the film justifiably worth your time.
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