REMEMBER: Gloriously Trashy, But Is It In On The Joke?

As a director, Atom Egoyan has increasingly shifted away from the emotionally raw content of his beloved 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter in favour of seedier, pulpier material that film suggested he had emotionally matured away from. Egoyan’s love of trash cinema informed his earlier work, but after showcasing his potential to make a drama film divorced of genre pretensions, the fact he is still preoccupied with putting an unwarranted arthouse inflection on such material feels like wasted potential.

How to make trash cinema out of human tragedy without being offensive

He manages to attract the attention of A-list casts and find his way back into the official selection of the Cannes official selection with most releases, purely on the strength of his earlier work, not out of a desire to honour his current sub-De Palma mindset. With Remember he almost perfects the balance between emotional resonance and B-movie excess. At times laughably tasteless, other times emotionally overwrought, yet endlessly entertaining and fascinating in a way his films haven’t been for a long while. You may be outraged that one of the most traumatic historical events is used as a contextual backdrop for a trashy thriller, but it is unlikely you’ll be remotely bored.

Remember re-teams Egoyan with Christopher Plummer, here starring as Auschwitz survivor Zev Gutman, riddled with dementia and living a miserable existence in a nursing home, waking up every morning forgetting the reason why his deceased wife isn’t in the room with him. Also at the nursing home is fellow Auschwitz survivor Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau) who informs Zev of a soldier at the concentration camp who emigrated to the US after the war, under the false name of Rudy Korlander, responsible for murdering both of their families.

He then tells Zev to escape from the nursing home and to go on a cross country trip tracking down the correct Rudy Korlander. And because brevity is the soul of wit, this entire set-up is completed and dispersed with in the space of four minutes. It has been a while since I’ve seen a film so disinterested in setting up a narrative and just wants to eagerly get on with it.

The narrative puts a revenge-thriller spin on a similar narrative executed in Paolo Sorrentino’s 2011 English-language debut This Must Be the Place, about a retired goth rock star (a bizarre Sean Penn performance) who travels to America to find the concentration camp officer who kept his father imprisoned. Despite themes of revenge, that film felt more like a quirky, Wim Wenders style US road-trip seen through distinctively European eyes. Egoyan’s film isn’t devoid of quirks, sharing many of the same road-trip similarities as that film, albeit disinterested in the “real people” of middle America that aren’t relevant to the narrative.

The quirks here are all due to overwrought screenwriting, never fully letting you know whether the director is in on the joke or not (the screenplay is from debutant screenwriter Benjamin August). For example, Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris co-stars as the son of a Neo-Nazi who is almost comically calm about the whole white supremacy thing, with his hatred manifesting itself in silly ways. His dog is called Eva, a name that is repeatedly shouted in case the joke was too subtle the first time around. Elsewhere, Zev is allowed to cross the Canadian border with an out of date passport, shrugged off by Canadian border control with a mere “you should probably get a new one”.

In on the joke?

This may be a silly and minor sequence, but it is ultimately worthwhile for establishing a lack of realism. Because this narrative uses a real, horrific event as a backdrop for a thriller, the more the reality of the film is shown as unrealistic and barely functioning, the more forgiving an audience will be to future twists and turns that position this far closer to exploiting a tragedy for the sake of suspense. On the other hand, this equally leaves mixed feelings as I can’t be fully certain these were Egoyan’s intentions and that this isn’t just poorly conceived.

After all, this provides more laughs than any other film with a narrative concerning the aftermath of genocide, which is a tasteless idea if conceived in that way. But wrestling with my thoughts on the film were never a concern during its run time – I could acknowledge its tastelessness without ever once desiring to turn it off. This may be a stupendously silly thriller, but the way in which it mounts the silliness and the tension in equal measure is close to masterful.

The performances feel more knowing than the film itself. Plummer ably launches directly into self-parody from the opening moments, ensuring that we shouldn’t take anything seriously, in spite of the frequently heartfelt narrative. From its opening moments he treads cautiously by not treading cautiously, going as silly as possible so real Jewish communities affected by the tragedy won’t regard it as realism, but perfectly pulpy fun. It also helps undercut the brilliantly preposterous twist that is left until the final moments, which although emotionally devastating, is still divorced from reality in order to not be rendered offensive.

The aforementioned Dean Norris appearance is another example of him reading drama as black comedy – he frequently stated in interviews he always conceived the award winning drama series in which he starred was a dark comedy that only appealed to his sense of humour. He chews up the scenery, playing a horrific person with as much flare for comedy as possible to help illustrate how innately nonsensical white supremacists are. Throughout, the score by Egoyan’s regular collaborator Mychael Danna is reminiscent of Jon Brion’s scores for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Punch-Drunk Love, establishing a whimsical heightened reality that is charmingly disorienting.

Conclusion

Remember is a gloriously trashy thriller, turning a narrative that could have easily been prestige season awards-bait into pure nonsensical pulp. For me, it never became tasteless, even as it was theoretically exploiting a tragedy for B-movie gains.

[highlighted_p boxed=”false” center=”false”]Is it fair for a film to take a comedic spin on tragic past events? Share your thoughts below!

Remember is released on March 11 in the US. All international release dates are here.