Crossing the episodic, unlikely-detective story of Broken Flowers with the contemporary Nazi-hunting oddity of This Must Be the Place, Atom Egoyan’s Remember—much darker than either of those films—is an intriguing but not wholly successful curio that yokes a ridiculous and lurid story to a central performance of high seriousness. The numerous familiar plot elements aren’t the problem; rather, the disparity between tone and content, while interesting, makes it seem that Egoyan isn’t entirely sure what kind of film he’s making. Remember traffics in some rich thematic material, and Christopher Plummer’s towering presence is compelling, but all of this is undercut by a B-movie revenge plot that, were it not dressed up in the guise of a sober drama, would fall in line with any number of exploitation films. Egoyan has a history of art-ing up some pretty trashy subject matter, but as with the once-great filmmaker’s recent string of flops, it just doesn’t work this time. That said, Remember is Egoyan’s best film in years.
Our protagonist, Zev Guttman (Plummer), is an octogenarian with a failing memory, a recently deceased wife and a serial number tattooed on his arm that indicates his unfortunate Nazi-era German vintage. His fellow nursing home inmate, Max (Martin Landau, still alive), another Holocaust survivor, urges the more able-bodied Zev to hit the road in search of the camp guard, Otto Wallisch (alias Rudy Kurlander), who murdered their families. Max has a plan ready to go: four possible suspects, addresses, a letter to Zev for when his memory lets him down. So Zev follows his instructions, traveling across the country (and dipping into Canada, Egoyan’s homeland) with a newly-purchased Glock while his worried son (Henry Czerny), who knows nothing about any of this, tries to follow his trail and bring him back home.
Screenwriter Benjamin August effectively builds tension at certain moments, but he frequently lets the air out by overplaying his hand. Much of the suspense comes from Zev working to figure out the identity of each Rudy Kurlander without revealing his own identity or intentions. One of the men he confronts turns out to be a proud German soldier, but not the sadistic guard he seeks; another isn’t a Nazi at all, but a fellow survivor. But the best confrontation is with “Breaking Bad”’s Dean Norris as police officer and neo-Nazi John Kurlander, son of the deceased Kurlander #3. It’s a drawn out white-knuckler that unfortunately goes over the top by the end, tapping into Norris’s explosive side instead of his far more compelling inner rage.
This section of the film, which finds Zev posing as a former camp guard to ingratiate himself to Norris’s character, is fairly compelling thriller material, and Egoyan handles it quite well. But Egoyan’s craftsmanship, while not as distinctive as it once was, isn’t really at issue. As the film goes on, the absurdity sinks in deeper and deeper until it reaches its Grand Guignol ending that makes one completely rethink the 85 minutes that lead up to it—it’s certainly not the adult drama it appeared to be at first. Too silly to be taken seriously but too heavy-handed to be purely enjoyable, Remember is a fascinating failure.
