Atom Egoyan’s last festival outing was in Cannes with the risible The Captive. Entering the cinema for Remember, critics in Venice were filled with a mixture of dread and malicious anticipation of a juicy one-star review. Instead, Egoyan surprised and delighted us with this tale of remembering and willful forgetfulness.
Remember stars the perennially watchable Christopher Plummer as Zev, the inmate of an old people’s home who has just lost his wife Ruth. Zev (Hebrew for wolf) suffers from senile dementia and has to be constantly reminded that his wife is dead. Luckily, his friend Max (Martin Landau) is on hand to help him out and fill in the gaps – and it is Max who sends Zev out on a mission to hunt down and kill the Auschwitz guard responsible for annihilating both men’s families. The idea is to seek out four possible contenders, all of whom share the same name.
And thus Zev makes his escape and hops on the train for Cleveland to find Zurlander number one, befriending a super-sweet kid en route. In fact, just about everyone in the film is super nice, ready to offer succour and sustenance to this fragile elderly man. There are a couple of exceptions, most notably suspect number one and the son of number three, a great cameo from Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris, a state trooper with two failed marriages, an Alsatian called Eva and a bunch of Nazi memorabilia he’s too soppy about to part with.
When Zev arrives at suspect number four’s home, the film reaches a denouement that is both dramatic and horribly familiar. Stories of Nazis insinuating themselves into society after the war and living with impunity have been covered particularly well in South American cinema, but also in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, also starring Plummer, whose character is unmasked as a Nazi war criminal. What makes this film unusual is its use of unbidden dementia juxtaposed against the purposeful forgetting of an inglorious and ignominious past. Zev has forgotten his time in Auschwitz, but he has also forgotten much of his happy past with Ruth and their son David (Henry Czerny). Max is the memory store whose life has been dedicated to hunting these hidden Nazis and bringing them to justice. The audience is reminded through Max that memory of the atrocities is vital and that time should not erase or diminish our awareness of them.
Plummer has been enjoying some super roles in recent years, his own mental faculties seemingly undimmed. He carries this film, appearing in every scene. As with The Captive, music also plays a central role as Zev is a skilled pianist (with pianos serendipitously popping up all over the place). Playing Wagner, a man asks Zev “Shouldn’t you hate Wagner?” to which Zev replies that you should never hate music. For Zev, and Egoyan, music transcends boundaries and politics.
Perhaps the weakest part of the film is Zev’s dementia, which bears little resemblance to the reality of this hateful disease, and also his reliance on Max’s letter to remind him of his tasks. However, medical anomalies aside, Egoyan is back on form with this entertaining and intelligent Holocaust thriller.
