| Review |
At least you have to give this twentysomething tearjerker credit for honesty—not emotional, perhaps, but structural. A picture set in New York in 2001 that ostentatiously sets its very first scene on a subway platform that has the World Trade Center towers showcased firmly in the background is informing you from the first moment how it’s going to wind up. Unfortunately, the road to the inevitable conclusion of “Remember Me” is a rocky one indeed.
After a prologue set in 1991—in which a mother is shot by robbers on that subway platform while her eleven-year old daughter looks on—Will Fetters’ script leaps ahead ten years, when NYC slacker Tyler Hawkins (Robert Pattinson), in full James Dean mode, is still grieving over the suicide of his beloved older brother some years before. And though his relationship with his mother Diane (Lena Olin) and her new husband is fine, and he’s especially protective of his eleven-year sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins)—an aspiring artist who’s considered an oddball by her classmates--he’s at constant loggerheads with his father Charles (Pierce Brosnan), a powerful lawyer whose failure to support Caroline’s dream he deplores.
Into Robert’s life comes a tough cop, Neil Craig (Chris Cooper), who arrests Tyler and his goofy roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington) after a street scuffle in which Tyler merely intervened to prevent a beating but then protested Craig’s rough treatment of the victims. When Aidan finds out that Craig’s daughter Ally (Emilie de Ravin) attends classes with them, he encourages Tyler to romance her with the intention of dumping her eventually as an act of revenge. That might sound like a premise of a bad high school comedy, but it’s played entirely seriously here, especially after Neil’s temper sends Ally fleeing to Tyler’s apartment and taking up residence there. We should add that Ally’s always taking cabs and avoiding the subway—what do you suppose that’s about? And how do you think she’ll react when she learns about Tyler’s motive in approaching her in the first place, even though he’s really, really fallen in love with her?
Everybody’s suffering in “Remember Me,” and they all play out their doleful scenes with a grimness that wouldn’t be out of place on the Lifetime Network—it’s a tearjerker piled on a tearjerker. Neil (with Cooper stretching his usual hangdog expression to the limit) is still grieving over his wife and Ally over her mother (with de Ravin following every brief smile by lapsing back into the doldrums—how else can you play a character who always has desert first because she might expire during the meal?), and Caroline (the gloomy Jerins) pines for her father’s attention while questioning her talent and suffering the nastiness of the snooty classmates who—horrors!—cut her hair. (Aidan’s the exception, although one might say that he’s suffering, thanks to Ellington’s irritatingly nails-on-a-blackboard performance, from a case of utter obnoxiousness.)
But the prime example of Extreme Angst is Tyler, whom Pattinson plays with more sad glances and twisted grimaces than he did the unhappy vampire of the “Twilight” franchise. The poor fellow suffers and suffers and suffers, and even when things seem to have turned out a bit better for him, calamity looms just around the corner. Of course, the disaster is a national tragedy rather than just a familial one, and one can’t watch the last ten minutes or so of the picture without feeling that it’s being used in a really tawdry way, merely to cap off a cheap litany of literary woe.
If there’s any saving grace to the picture, it’s the performance of Brosnan, who plays a bastard with the best of them. Alternately scowling and smiling sarcastically, bearing himself with a pugnacious air, he may be a stock figure—the urban variant of the clueless dad Jim Backus played in “Rebel Without a Cause” and Raymond Massey in “East of Eden” (to name only the Dean models), but in his hands it’s strong stock. Too bad Charles goes soft in the end; his conversion is the least impressive part of the character arc.
On the technical side, the crew—including cinematographer Jonathan Freeman—maintain the bleak atmosphere the story demands, as does Marcelo Zarvos’ score. But they’re just doing their job to capture the mood of a piece that, in spite of the effort to insert an uplifting tag at the end, comes off as a gloomily mawkish, manipulative soap opera that uses the sad historical context in a way many will consider offensive. |
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