Remember (2015) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Thriller

Tagline: Dark truths will come to light.

With the aid of a fellow Auschwitz survivor and a hand-written letter, an elderly man with dementia goes in search of the person responsible for the death of his family.

Storyline: "Remember" is the contemporary story of Zev, who discovers that the Nazi guard who murdered his family some 70 years ago is living in America under an assumed identity. Despite the obvious challenges, Zev sets out on a mission to deliver long-delayed justice with his own trembling hand. What follows is a remarkable cross-continent road-trip with surprising consequences. Written by 72nd Venice International Film Festival

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, May 2, 2016 Note: While no outright spoilers are posted in this review, it's impossible to discuss certain plot points in Remember without at least hinting at a major reveal. Therefore, those adept at "reading between the lines" are encouraged to skip down to the technical portions of the review, below. The entirety of the "twist" at the core of Remember is in fact contained in the film's very title. The ostensible meaning of this imperative would seem to be (and can certainly be taken as) a command never to forget the horrors of the Holocaust, something that has become even more urgent with the passing of time, the passing of survivors, and a natural attrition and atrophying of the visceral impact those horrors inflicted on mid-century Mankind. While there are of course the radical fringe elements that completely deny the fact that the Holocaust ever occurred, what's perhaps just as troubling (or at least nearly as troubling) is the increasingly sanguine reactions that younger folks especially seem to have to the wholesale slaughter of millions of people, an element that makes things like the Shoah Project so important. In my own hometown of Portland, Oregon, there are a couple of Jewish retirement homes where I've frequently provided musical entertainment that still have a few (a rapidly diminishing few) who have the telltale tattoos scrawled across their forearms, a chilling reminder of outrages long passed but obviously inescapable. One of the kind of odd things about this, and one which plays at least tangentially into Remember's subtext, is the fact that many of these survivors understandably don't want to dwell on the past, and some in fact resolutely refuse to even discuss their experiences in the camps (a "flip side" analogy can be found in many members of the Greatest Generation, who similarly refrain from discussing their heroics in fighting Nazism during World War II). A nursing home at least somewhat like those I visit in the Pacific Northwest is the starting place for Remember's somewhat twisted tale of revenge and, ultimately, identity. The film's big "twist" may be seen coming a mile away from virtually the get go, at least for those attuned to the tendency of some contemporary screenwriters to indulge in so much misdirection that suspicions almost inevitably accrue as to what's "really" going on, but even putting aside that potential dissipator of climactic intensity, the film offers some excellent performances and an elegiac ambience that makes it an often riveting viewing experience.

Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) is an elderly Jew battling Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia, whiling away his final hours in a New York nursing home where he seemingly drifts in and out of relative rationality, a situation further exacerbated by the recent death of his wife, Ruth. He at least has a devoted friend in resident Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau), a Jew who, like Zev himself, managed to make it through the gauntlet of Auschwitz to try to build a life for himself in a post- World War II universe. Max seems intent on getting Zev to remember a number of details about their shared past, including memories of a camp enforcer named Otto Wallisch, one who is (according to Max) responsible for the deaths of the families of both Max and Zev.

Max in fact turns out to have an agenda in helping Zev to dredge up his experiences from a lifetime ago. Wallisch supposedly got out of Nazi Germany alive himself and adopted a "new" identity as one Rudy Kurlander. Max has tracked down a quartet of men sharing that name and encourages the often confused Zev to take revenge. This facet of the film's screenplay stretches credulity to the breaking point, but under the taut direction of Atom Egoyan, this potential stumbling block is only a temporary hurdle, and an increasing feeling of tension and unease helps to carry things along, albeit on a perhaps somewhat wobbly foundation. A structural artifice further shakes the foundation, but is at least understandable from the standpoint that scenarist Benjamin August wants to maintain suspense in the early going. What this ends up doing, though, is delaying some needed context and explanation until around a half hour in, making a lot of what initially transpires with Zev play so confoundingly to the audience that they may feel like they're in some sort of early onset dementia.

In a probably unintentionally ironic feeling of reference, what happens next plays eerily similar to Laurence Olivier's exploits tracking down The Boys From Brazil, with Zev on an expedition of sorts to "meet and greet" (and potentially kill) the various men named Kurlander if he determines that they're actually Wallisch. (Another perhaps more felicitious reference comes courtesy of a note Zev jots on his wrist to remind him of what's going on, in a gambit that seems eerily similar to Memento.) Things move along briskly enough to avoid too many lingering questions about logic, but a lot of Remember relies on a rather staggering amount of preplanning by the elderly and obviously quite ill Max. How Max expects the even more discombobulated Zev to complete this "impossible mission" is never satisfactorily explained, either, and remains the single biggest lapse in logic the film offers. The whole "twist", while undeniably shocking (in its depiction if not in its actual reveal), tends to cheapen the Holocaust in a way, though, making it seem like an M. Night Shyamalan "moment" rather than one of the most disturbing phenomena in the annals of recorded history.

Remember may not be, well, unforgettable, but it's reasonably compelling and benefits from the combined gravitas of Plummer and Landau. Still, the film works way too hard to get to its "twist" (any film that goes out of its way to prevent the audience from seeing a salient piece of information is letting the cat out of the bag from the get go, at least for armchair "twist guessers" like yours truly). Something about even having a "twist" in a film ostensibly about the horrors of the Holocaust grates at least a little on my personal sensibilities, but your mileage may vary. Technical merits are strong, and with caveats noted, Remember comes Recommended.

[CSW] -3.4- There is a lot of visual storytelling in this film, which isn't to say that it's slowly paced--I found it very tense primarily because some of the visual and auditory cues have dual meanings which should become more resonant as the film progresses. The title itself holds layers of meaning, not only related to protagonist Zev's memory loss, but also to cultural-historical memory. Keeping in mind director Atom Egoyan's Armenian heritage, the title also harkens to Hitler's famous justification of his "final solution" by stating, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" One of the best thrillers I've seen in a long time that, for reasons best not revealed here, will certainly hold up to repeated viewings; if only to better pick up on the myriad of dual meanings. Please go into this movie blind so that you can experience its full impact. I did.
[V4.0-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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