'Remember': Review

No-one is that likely to object these days to the Holocaust being used as a theme in a thriller  - concentration camp imagery, after all, has been seen in recent years in Hollywood productions such as Shutter Island and X-Men. Combine the theme with another sensitive topic, Alzheimer’s, and you’re risking accusations of questionable taste, at the very least. Yet this is a problem that Atom Egoyan skirts adroitly in Remember, a stripped-down drama built around a powerful and sometimes troubling performance by Christopher Plummer.

Christopher Plummer gives his beleaguered seeker dignity, charisma and vulnerability in astutely dosed measure.

Unusually working from another writer’s script, Egoyan strips away the usual self-referential layers of his cinema - so visible in his last feature, baroque thriller The Captive - to offer a spare, to-the-point execution of what is essentially a one-hero drama. With its elderly leads and uncomfortable premise, Remember won’t have the easiest time luring audiences, but for an older constituency and upmarket thriller aficionados, Plummer’s performance and a few trad suspense tropes won’t lack appeal.

Working from a script by Benjamin August, the film follows Zev Guttman (Plummer), an elderly resident of a care home, who is having dementia issues following the death of his wife. Guttman and his family, notably adult son Charles (Czerny) are completing the traditional Jewish mourning ceremonies, and it’s now time for Zev to undertake a secret mission, as agreed with fellow resident Max Zucker (Martin Landau). Zev only intermittently understands or remembers exactly what’s going on, but Max has planned everything, and sends Zev on the road with a stack of money and a set of instructions, including the purchase of a gun.

Zev’s quest is to track down a fugitive German camp commandant who – as Max has learned in his work with Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal – is living in North America under the assumed name Rudy Kurlander. Zev duly visits a number of Rudy Kurlanders, one of whom (Bruno Ganz)  believes that Hitler had the right idea but the wrong approach. Another Rudy is already dead, but Zev is welcomed into his house by the man’s affable state trooper son – the name of whose dog, Eva, is a clue to his political leanings. This is the film’s most gripping sequence, played with a streak of black comedy, and show-stealing support playing from Breaking Bad regular Dean Norris.

Along the way, Zev’s determination is occasionally ruffled by such moments of truth, and by the painful realities of his decline, from memory loss to incontinence – but Plummer gives his beleaguered seeker dignity, charisma and vulnerability in astutely dosed measure. There is potential for mawkwishness along the way – two encounters with candid kids, when one might have been sufficient – and the only truly problematic moment comes in Zev’s final encounter. Here Jürgen Prochnow’s old-age make-up contrasts jarringly with the unfakeably liver-spotted appearance of Plummer and Landau (the younger Ganz, sporting a white beard, is more convincing).

The climax packs a surprise, although a brief coda arguably raises the question of how explicitly the pay-off needed to be spelled out in the final moments. Contrived though August’s construction might seem (it is his first produced script), the film benefits from using its memory loss theme sparingly, rather than go the full nine miles in the style of Before I Go To Sleep or Memento (although there’s a nod to that film in the play on reminders scribbled on the flesh and prison camp tattoos). Shot in the vibrantly atmospheric style that DoP Paul Sarossy usually brings to Egoyan’s films, Remember only really overstates its case in Mychael Danna’s often too emphatic score.