Perhaps more than anything, Atom Egoyan’s Remember is a visual thrift shop of bespoke signs and symbols from film and pulp-fiction lore. A letter, delivered clandestinely, containing dangerous instructions. A mysterious train ticket and a cache of money. A Glock 9-mm. revolver. Nazi paraphernalia. At least one, if not many, stolen identities. A quest to uncover the truth.
These elements are familiar, but most such plots do not begin in a nursing home, and most of their protagonists are not widowed octogenarian Holocaust survivors with dementia. Such are the brazen distinctions of this highly implausible but unwaveringly crackerjack thriller that marries calculated Hitchcockian texture with the twisty mind games of early Shyamalan or Christopher Nolan, with Simon Wiesenthal writing the vows.
In an era when most thrillers, at best, telegraph their revelations and at worst succumb to plagiaristic clichés, Remember is innovative, exciting and emotionally stirring, keeping us guessing until its final frame and beyond. And for Egoyan, the cerebral Canadian auteur who’s been lost in a wilderness of micro-distributed, unintentionally self-parodic bombs for more than a decade, it’s a welcome return to Cinema That Matters.
“Sometimes I forget things,” admits Christopher Plummer’s Zev Gutman to an inquiring mind early in the film, and it’s an understatement. His wife recently departed, but he wakes from every moment of slumber beckoning her company, unaware of his surroundings, until a patient nurse or, more likely, his friend and fellow-resident Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau) reorients him.
Remember would be a long, dreary movie if it remained among the wheelchairs, walkers, breathing apparatuses and cardboard dinners of the care home. But Zev is hastily liberated from this stifling milieu thanks to an agreement struck years earlier with Max, also a survivor of Auschwitz: that following his wife’s death, Zev will attempt to hunt and kill the SS commander who butchered both of their families in the Holocaust. Max knows that the geriatric Nazi has been living under the identity of one of his Jewish victims for decades, but with five elderly North American men currently living under that name, it’s a wild goose chase that can — and does — span several days and countless miles, from Tahoe to Boise to Canada.
For Zev, the quest amounts to following orders from Max’s precise itinerary, scripted in longhand alongside the necessary reminders required for Zev to function, always beginning with his wife’s passing. Every morning is, for Zev, a mental reboot, with Max’s letter serving as his lifeline. The heartbreaking inevitability of Zev’s condition is ever-present in Plummer’s richly nuanced performance, but Egoyan never wallows in pity. Dementia is this movie hero’s humanizing impediment, the narrative equivalent of a walking stick or a coke habit, something to be regularly addressed and overcome.
Zev’s journey is fraught with clever disruptions, any of which could expose his plot and send him shuttling and shuffling back to the rigor mortis of the nursing home — an expired passport, a nosy security officer outside a shopping mall, a pot of coffee spilled on Max’s instructions. All the while, his son Charles (Henry Czerny) is searching for him back home, waiting for him to use a credit card to expose his location.
The heart of the film, however, are the encounters with the potential Nazis, none of which I’ll spoil. Although it’s worth mentioning that one such scene includes a terrifying cameo by Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris — once again playing a cop — that will stop your breath. A scene consumed with unbearable tension, it represents an argument for the absolute necessity of profanity and violence, and it’s a very early candidate for the Best Supporting Actor nomination.
A final-act twist seems initially unsatisfying but ultimately appropriate to Egoyan’s larger themes: the epic failings of memory, our capacity for reinvention, the lies we tell ourselves to assuage our guilt. Backtracking from this revelation can lead the viewer down some illogical narrative wormholes, but just like Zev’s impossible sharpshooting skills with the Glock, we can forgive them in the context of this movie’s marvelous chutzpah, in which the impossible journey is the destination.
REMEMBER. Director: Atom Egoyan; Cast: Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Henry Czerny, Bruno Ganz, Dean Norris, Jurgen Prochnow; Distributor: A24; Rating: R; Opens: Now playing at The Tower Theater in Miami; it opens in Palm Beach County next month