Christopher Plummer hunts Nazis in Remember

    1 of 2 2 of 2

      Starring Christopher Plummer. Rating unavailable.

      Christopher Plummer carries the right gravity as an elderly man travelling back through a nasty past already clouded by dementia. Despite that grim description, the forgettably titled Remember is a devilish entertainment that uses our own collective knowledge against us in decidedly twisted ways.

      Plummer’s 90-year-old Zev Guttman has recently lost his beloved wife, and now his memory is going. Too bad director Atom Egoyan, in his best effort for quite some time, didn’t place a photo of Julie Andrews by Zev’s bedside at a Midwestern retirement home. No Austrian aristocrat, he’s a Holocaust survivor with the tattoo to prove it, as Zev is constantly reminded by another resident with a shared history. Martin Landau plays the wheelchair-bound Max, who has tasked his more mobile friend with the mission—should he choose to accept it—of tracking down a hated Auschwitz guard.

      Turns out there are three ancient Rudy Kurlanders living in the U.S. and Canada. Armed with some cash, detailed instructions from Max, and a Glock 9mm, Zev makes a false start and then finds a better candidate in a scary place called Idaho. (Everything here was actually shot in Ontario.) Instead, he meets the man’s son, a psychotic deputy (Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris) with a German shepherd called Eva.

      Eventually, Zev tracks down another Rudy, played by Das Boot captain Jürgen Prochnow in rather unfortunate aging makeup. It’s a shame he didn’t trade places with Bruno Ganz, who appears briefly here and of course was Herr Hitler in those Downfall clips spoofed in endless permutations on YouTube. With a pulpy, frankly preposterous script by first-timer Benjamin August, the movie raises unexpected questions about the supposed innocence of youth and the seemliness of its own storytelling devices. It asks us to keep unpacking what only appear to be settled memories.

      Comments