Review of Remember (2015) by Matt C — 10 Apr 2016

Remember is a great example of two movies: a movie that you see "just because" and a movie that easily could have been better. Going into this essentially cold and not even having remembered seeing a trailer for it, the foundation of my knowledge of this movie relied on the IMDb synopsis and my knowing that A24 distributed it.

And honestly, the movie is pretty much what it would appear to be at a first glance. Here's a thriller led by a strong lead performance and some good direction, but it suffers from an underdeveloped and sometimes exploitative script that ends up making the story developments feel unearned.

Basically, elderly Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) is an Auchwitz survivor with dementia who, with the help of a friend at his assisted living home, tries to track down the man that killed his family during the Holocaust.

It's an interesting enough premise, and it never feels entirely lost. The clear win here is Plummer's performance, which balances the character's sense of agency with the effects of his disability.

The material calls for a lot of its lead--namely work that won't chew the scenery or play up the protagonist's disadvantages--and Plummer fully delivers, creating a likable character, and one that's a realistic as one within this script can be.

The direction also works to the movie's advantage, and although it isn't great, it makes good use of locations, interior and exterior. The movie takes place in a variation of places ranging from hospitals, rural areas, trains, and a lake house, and they all have their own distinct feelings that reflect what's happening at a given moment.

With this, Remember sounds pretty solid, but it's Benjamin August's screenplay that drags everything down. It's his first feature script, and it kind of shows. From the beginning, something feels a little off.

The movie's structure makes the protagonist's backstory not as clear as it should be until later on, and the stakes at hand suffer as a result. The film also minimizes a fair amount of supporting characters that eventually grow to become more integral to the story, and by the time that they're involvement becomes more apparent, it's far too late to develop them and the plot twists feel unearned.

The intention is always apparent, but the script doesn't flesh out everything, making the movie really stretch to connect point A to point B. The issue that struck me the most, though, was an unneeded amount of exploitative drama.

By the midpoint of the film, the script begins to pile on excessive and convenient ways to try to make the audience feel bad for Plummer's character despite the fact that his performance already did that.

It milks the drama related to the Holocaust and the main character's dementia. I understand that these are inherently dramatic topics, but the movie shouldn't depend on them to facilitate the drama and plot.

Ultimately, Remember may only really be--ahem--remembered for Plummer's work, but elsewhere, the movie feels like less than the he sum of its parts, and even a little preposterous at times. It definitely has its moments and it never reaches the territory of badness due to its direction, but it tries to hard and feels inauthentic as a result.

The pieces are there, but some things don't need to be jabbed into your eyes; they should just exist as is. 5.8/10, meh, one thumb down, below average, etc.