Review: Remember Me

Summit Entertainment presents a film directed by Allen Coulter. Written by Will Fetters. Running time: 113 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for violence, sexual content, language and smoking).

They say damaged people damage people, and that notion is at the heart of Remember Me, a middling drama with sincere performances featuring troubled young lovers that to its credit doesn’t insult or go for the easy stuff. But despite being framed by powerful opening and closing moments, the film hinges on a tepid romance starring two pretty actors who look great but have little to do, and less chemistry.

The film opens with a mother (an excellent Martha Plimpton) and young daughter victimized by muggers. When the mother is shot dead, her detective husband (Chris Cooper, laying on a thick working-class accent) is left to raise the girl alone. Flashing forward eleven years, the young girl is now NYU student, Ally (Emilie de Ravin), overprotected by her father in an obvious relationship. In a major screenwriting misstep, the film never digs into what we imagine would be her obvious emotional scars, worthy of only a passing mention.

Fellow NYU classmate Tyler (Robert Pattinson) broods while nursing his own familial rifts, deep enough to give him an Angry Young Man complex, and I found myself thinking back, at times, to James Dean in East of Eden, who desperately begged father Raymond Massey’s love in the all-time great father-son showdown. I imagine I’ll be alone in conjuring that reference, as the relationship here is off the shelf.

After his older brother’s suicide some years before that apparently split the family apart, Tyler’s mother (a wasted Lena Olin) has moved on to a new marriage. But his father (Pierce Brosnan), a powerful and seemingly heartless executive, is one of those callous movie stereotypes of wealthy smugness, ignoring his young daughter’s (Ruby Jerins) art recital and leaving no question in anyone’s mind why the couple called it quits. It’s this type of superficial screenwriting by scribe Will Fetters that hamstrings both Ally and Tyler’s parental issues into cardboard corners.

Fiercely protective of his younger sister and with an axe to grind against his father, Tyler brawls, gets arrested, rails against dad (who continually bails him out), tears up classrooms, has public outbursts and is his own worst enemy. A contrived wager leads to him ask out the daughter of the detective who arrested him for disorderliness—you guessed it, Ally.

The two begin a tentative courtship, tolerating the antics of Tyler’s repellant roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington), an obnoxious jerk who stops the film cold each time he opens his mouth. Both lovers are edgy, hesitant and push-pull each other mostly because the screenplay requires it, though they look at each other like they can’t wait to get into the sack.

Pattinson, of the aerodynamic hair and with intensity to spare, is no one’s idea of a heavyweight actor needed to pull off a character with this many personal issues (though he did stretch impressively in last year’s Dali pic Little Ashes). And the film, which reaches to address heavy stuff, is caught in the quagmire of trying to satisfy swooning teenaged girls and be all grown up at the same time—a tall order in American movies, and one that finds Remember Me coming up short.

If the theme has truth, the execution is not particularly compelling. The stars look great, which may be enough for a certain segment of the audience, but they never convince us they have passion. They mope, argue and have nicely-lit sex between bouts of confronting their respective parents, but they never generate the urgency of young lovers running from their respective blind spots.

In an effort to cater perhaps to Pattinson’s fan base, Remember Me focuses too much on the fledgling affair when the real, and more important theme—wrecked families can produce troubled children who have issues functioning both inside and outside the family unit—is the background for at least the first half.

Along the way there are wildly improbable scenes, including a laughable family confrontation in front of a boardroom of executives, which rings patently false for anyone who has ever spent a day in corporate America. And then there are the requisite changes of heart, too late.

To say the ending is a cruel sucker punch would be an understatement. I came out of Remember Me feeling very confused for reasons I cannot reveal, reluctantly moved by a jaw-dropping final montage—yet certain the film didn’t earn my tears on merit.

Tyler Robert Pattinson
Ally Craig Emilie de Ravin
Sgt. Neil Craig Chris Cooper
Diane Hirsch Lena Olin
Aidan Hall Tate Ellington
Caroline Ruby Jerins
Mr. Hawkins Pierce Brosnan

- Lee Shoquist