Christopher Plummer plays dementia-addled man who mounts implausible revenge journey
POINTS 4
It’s been such a long time since Atom Egoyan made a remarkable film that I can hardly remember what they used to be like. I guess Felicia’s Journey was one of the last remarkable ones — and that was back in 1999. So it’s not really a surprise that his new outing Remember, starring Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau, is at best another failed work with lofty ambitions and not much of a brain. It’s the type of film that gets all the more unbelievable as it unfolds and the very ending comes to prove it can always get worse.
This time, Egoyan addresses the Holocaust in such a pedestrian way that you often wonder if he — or first-time screenwriter August Benjamin — actually care for the subject, its complexity and its many implications. Maybe they do, but voluntarily or not, they simplify it, trivialize it, and disrespect it.
For starters, the absurd plot is eloquent enough. Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) is a recently widowed 90-year-old Auschwitz survivor who’s started to suffer from dementia and so lives in an expensive nursing home near New York. He’s friends with scholar Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau), another Auschwitz survivor, now wheel-chair bound, who has worked for the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and has tracked down four Nazis living in North America.
Max gives Zev an envelope full of cash and a long letter with instructions for a meticulous plan Zev had promised to carry out following his wife’s death. It so happens that Max is certain that one of the four suspects is the Auschwitz Blockführer (the prison block commander) who had slain his own family as well as Max’s some 70 years ago. Since the Nazi criminal has evaded justice, it’s now Zev’s duty to avenge their families and make the man, who goes by the fake name of Rudy Kurlander, pay for his crimes. That is to say, to kill him.
Let’s now start with the far-fetched plot. First, two very old men, one of them with growing dementia and the other stuck in a wheelchair and hooked up to an oxygen supply, have the acumen and resources to design and execute an elaborate plan to kill a Nazi criminal who not even the Justice Department has been able to find.
Second, Zev flees the nursing home easily and has no trouble at all travelling on his own, despite his dementia drawbacks.
Third, thanks to his charm and naivety, he manages to buy a gun without raising suspicions and without having his criminal and mental health background checked by the sales man.
Fourth, he also manages to cross the Canadian border with an expired passport thanks to a kind officer who turns a blind eye and asks for his driver’s licence instead.
Fifth, he has easy and swift access to where the two first Kurlander suspects live, only to realize they were the wrong men — one of them was actually another Auschwitz survivor, which allows for a cheesy moment of sentimentalism punctuated by purposefully heartbreaking music.
Now what’s really insulting to viewers’ intelligence is what happens when Zev gets to the home of the third suspect, where he meets not the man — who passed away three months before — but his son, an anti-Semite state trooper who proudly shows him his dad’s collection of swastikas, an SS uniform, a copy of Mein Kampf, and some other such stuff. The thing is, the state trooper doesn’t know who Zev is — he hasn’t even asked him why he came to see his father. By the time he asks him, he’s already shown him the Nazi memorabilia, so you can rightly guess he’s not happy to see a Jew in his house. Spoiler: Zev isn’t happy to see the memorabilia either, so he shoots the state trooper and his fierce German shepherd with the skill of an accomplished shooter. And to think he had never fired a gun before in his life. That’s what you’d call beginner’s luck.
Then, finally, there’s the big twist at the end. And what a ludicrous, moronic and offensive twist it is. As to avoid another spoiler, suffice it to say that a certain someone was not really who you thought.
In fact, he was not really who he thought he was himself. Because in the end you just have to remember, whether you like it or not, as the movie’s title tells you to do. Not only that, but in retrospect, the whole plot turns even more unbelievable and lurid. So cheap melodrama, obvious allegories, and lousy screenwriting take centre stage big time.
By the way, the performance by Christopher Plummer is the one and only asset of Remember. Even with this poor material, this veteran actor knows how to convey profound feelings, human fragility and existential turmoil that almost always ring true. Other than, forget Remember.
production notes
Remember (Canada, 2015). Directed by Atom Egoyan. Written by Benjamin August. With Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Bruno Ganz, Jurgen Prochnow, Heinz Lieven, Dean Norris, Henry Czerny. Cinematography: Paul Sarossy. Editing: Christopher Donaldson. Running time: 95 minutes.
@pablsuarez
