Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Remember Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 2, 2016

Note: While no outright spoilers are posted in this review, it’s impossible to discuss certain plot points in Remember without at least hinting at a major reveal. Therefore, those adept at “reading between the lines” are encouraged to skip down to the technical portions of the review, below.

The entirety of the “twist” at the core of Remember is in fact contained in the film’s very title. The ostensible meaning of this imperative would seem to be (and can certainly be taken as) a command never to forget the horrors of the Holocaust, something that has become even more urgent with the passing of time, the passing of survivors, and a natural attrition and atrophying of the visceral impact those horrors inflicted on mid-century Mankind. While there are of course the radical fringe elements that completely deny the fact that the Holocaust ever occurred, what’s perhaps just as troubling (or at least nearly as troubling) is the increasingly sanguine reactions that younger folks especially seem to have to the wholesale slaughter of millions of people, an element that makes things like the Shoah Project so important. In my own hometown of Portland, Oregon, there are a couple of Jewish retirement homes where I’ve frequently provided musical entertainment that still have a few (a rapidly diminishing few) who have the telltale tattoos scrawled across their forearms, a chilling reminder of outrages long passed but obviously inescapable. One of the kind of odd things about this, and one which plays at least tangentially into Remember’s subtext, is the fact that many of these survivors understandably don’t want to dwell on the past, and some in fact resolutely refuse to even discuss their experiences in the camps (a “flip side” analogy can be found in many members of the Greatest Generation, who similarly refrain from discussing their heroics in fighting Nazism during World War II). A nursing home at least somewhat like those I visit in the Pacific Northwest is the starting place for Remember’s somewhat twisted tale of revenge and, ultimately, identity. The film’s big “twist” may be seen coming a mile away from virtually the get go, at least for those attuned to the tendency of some contemporary screenwriters to indulge in so much misdirection that suspicions almost inevitably accrue as to what’s “really” going on, but even putting aside that potential dissipator of climactic intensity, the film offers some excellent performances and an elegiac ambience that makes it an often riveting viewing experience.

Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) is an elderly Jew battling Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia, whiling away his final hours in a New York nursing home where he seemingly drifts in and out of relative rationality, a situation further exacerbated by the recent death of his wife, Ruth. He at least has a devoted friend in resident Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau), a Jew who, like Zev himself, managed to make it through the gauntlet of Auschwitz to try to build a life for himself in a post- World War II universe. Max seems intent on getting Zev to remember a number of details about their shared past, including memories of a camp enforcer named Otto Wallisch, one who is (according to Max) responsible for the deaths of the families of both Max and Zev.

Max in fact turns out to have an agenda in helping Zev to dredge up his experiences from a lifetime ago. Wallisch supposedly got out of Nazi Germany alive himself and adopted a “new” identity as one Rudy Kurlander. Max has tracked down a quartet of men sharing that name and encourages the often confused Zev to take revenge. This facet of the film’s screenplay stretches credulity to the breaking point, but under the taut direction of Atom Egoyan, this potential stumbling block is only a temporary hurdle, and an increasing feeling of tension and unease helps to carry things along, albeit on a perhaps somewhat wobbly foundation. A structural artifice further shakes the foundation, but is at least understandable from the standpoint that scenarist Benjamin August wants to maintain suspense in the early going. What this ends up doing, though, is delaying some needed context and explanation until around a half hour in, making a lot of what initially transpires with Zev play so confoundingly to the audience that they may feel like they're in some sort of early onset dementia.

In a probably unintentionally ironic feeling of reference, what happens next plays eerily similar to Laurence Olivier’s exploits tracking down The Boys From Brazil, with Zev on an expedition of sorts to “meet and greet” (and potentially kill) the various men named Kurlander if he determines that they’re actually Wallisch. (Another perhaps more felicitious reference comes courtesy of a note Zev jots on his wrist to remind him of what’s going on, in a gambit that seems eerily similar to Memento.)

Things move along briskly enough to avoid too many lingering questions about logic, but a lot of Remember relies on a rather staggering amount of preplanning by the elderly and obviously quite ill Max. How Max expects the even more discombobulated Zev to complete this “impossible mission” is never satisfactorily explained, either, and remains the single biggest lapse in logic the film offers. The whole “twist”, while undeniably shocking (in its depiction if not in its actual reveal), tends to cheapen the Holocaust in a way, though, making it seem like an M. Night Shyamalan “moment” rather than one of the most disturbing phenomena in the annals of recorded history.

Remember Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Remember is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Shot digitally with Arri products (including the Arri Amira, the first time I recall seeing this camera listed on IMDb for films I've personally reviewed), this boasts a typically glossy, sleek if often fairly shallow looking image. Egoyan and cinematographer Paul Sarossy favor what appear to be natural lighting conditions, though several longer segments have been bathed in a slightly amber hue, leading to just a touch of murk and less than fulsome shadow definition. In the bright daytime, and especially when the film ventures out of doors, the image pops extremely well, with abundant levels of fine detail, an element helped by the repeated use of extreme close-ups (often with the backgrounds almost impressionistically out of focus, perhaps to indicate Zev's addled state of mind). The palette looks healthy and natural, and there are no issues with image instability or with compression anomalies.

Remember Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Remember features a workmanlike but hardly awe inspiring DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, one which creates most of its immersion from well placed ambient environmental effects and from Mychael Danna's elegiac, low string graced score. Zev is a pianist of some note (sorry), and so there are several interludes where he supposedly tickles the ivories. (This is neither here nor there, and isn't a soundtrack issue per se, but this is now the second film I've recently reviewed—the other being Heartless—where the stars are badly in need of "finger synching" coaching when pretending to play the piano. I have a good friend who is an internationally known dialect coach who zings from film and television set to film and television set helping stars master the ins and outs of various patois, and I'm beginning to think I could forge a well paying career helping actors mimic pianism more effectively than Plummer does in this outing.) Fidelity is fine and there are no issues with damage, dropouts or distortion.

Remember Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Director Atom Egoyan, Producer Robert Lantos and Writer Benjamin August


• Performances to Remember (1080p; 16:49) is an EPK focusing largely on the efforts of Plummer and Landau.


• A Tapestry of Evil: Remembering the Past (1080p; 13:47) is a much more interesting piece which briefly but compellingly reviews actual historical efforts to bring Holocaust enablers to justice.

Remember Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Remember may not be, well, unforgettable, but it's reasonably compelling and benefits from the combined gravitas of Plummer and Landau. Still, the film works way too hard to get to its "twist" (any film that goes out of its way to prevent the audience from seeing a salient piece of information is letting the cat out of the bag from the get go, at least for armchair "twist guessers" like yours truly). Something about even having a "twist" in a film ostensibly about the horrors of the Holocaust grates at least a little on my personal sensibilities, but your mileage may vary. Technical merits are strong, and with caveats noted, Remember comes Recommended.