Christopher Plummer does his best to remember Sammy Jankis.
By Josh Lasser
Who are we if not the sum of our experiences, both the good ones and the bad. Christopher Plummer’s new movie, Remember, asks what happens when those experiences—those memories—start to disappear.
Directed by Atom Egoyan, Remember finds Plummer playing Auschwitz survivor, Zev Guttman. Zev is suffering from dementia, a condition made worse by the recent passing of his wife, Ruth. In fact, every time Zev wakes up, whether from a nap or a long slumber, he calls out for her, wondering where she is. It is a refrain repeated in the movie, and it never fails to make one feel for the man.
The heart of the tale though is not Zev’s losing his wife nor his feelings stemming from that loss, but rather the journey a friend of his, Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau), sends him on once Zev is finished sitting shiva. As Max explains it, Zev promised that once his wife had passed on, he would find a man by the name of Rudy Kurlander. There are, it seems, four men of that name in the U.S. and Canada, and Max has coordinated the trip for Zev.
Here we must get into lightly spoiler-y territory, but nothing that isn’t found out terribly early on in the film (or by reading any synopsis of Remember anywhere).
Martin Landau (L) and Christopher Plummer (R) in Remember.
We quickly learn that Zev and Max were both prisoners at Auschwitz, not that Zev remembers this anymore, and that Rudy Kurlander is the name one of the Nazi guards at Auschwitz took when emigrating to the States after the war. Zev’s mission is to find Kurlander and kill him.
It is a horrible task, one of questionable morality in general and made worse by it being 90-year-old Zev who is tasked with it. Every time Zev wakes up, after calling for Ruth, he finds a letter Max gave him reminding Zev of his task and the promise Zev made.
Consequently, every time Zev wakes up, he lives the horror of what he must do anew. Still, Zev takes his journey, seeking out Rudy Kurlander after Rudy Kurlander, searching his memory to discern if the Rudy Kurlander in front of him is the Rudy Kurlander from Auschwitz.
One of the things Egoyan does brilliantly here is to not only offer the larger tale but to work in incredibly tense smaller moments as well. How will a security guard take it when he sees Zev’s gun? How will Zev get that gun across the border? What is Zev going to do about all the clothes he needs? What happens to Zev if he loses the letter that is guiding him? Over and over again, we are given these little horrible moments to cut the tension of the bigger horrible ones that may come.
Christopher Plummer and Dean Norris in Remember.
Throughout, Plummer offers an utterly heartbreaking performance. Sitting in the theater, we search his face for any sign about how much Zev remembers of his past, how much he remembers of his task. The answers come slowly, with Plummer and Egoyan slowly building the tension over and over again.
The supporting cast, most notably Landau, Henry Czerny, and Dean Norris are equally strong. Czerny is Charles Guttman, Zev’s son. Charles spends the majority of the movie looking for his lost father (Zev left the nursing home in the middle of the night to carry out his mission), and while that doesn’t offer Czerny a lot to do, it expands the tale in a way that makes it that much more heart-wrenching. Zev may be on this mission and may have lost his wife, but Zev isn’t alone in this world and could very well lose everyone else he loves.
Norris is John Kurlander, the son of one of the Rudys, and a fan of Nazi memorabilia. Not in the movie for an exceptionally long time, Norris still leaves an indelible impression. John tests Rudy and Rudy’s resolve in a new way, thereby offering another facet to Plummer’s character.
Truly, nearly everything in Remember is done in service of Plummer’s character and it is when this is not the case the movie falters. For much of the film, Max remains something of an enigma, we are unsure of his motivations, but near the end of the film, Remember lingers on Max too long, offering too much of a look at the character and rather than making us work it out, spoon feeds an answer. It is a small misstep, but a crucial one.
With a different director at the helm and a different actor in the lead role, Remember could easily fall into the trap of simply being another film about revenge. It could be a mundane mystery or a by the numbers thriller or a stodgy drama. Instead, it combines the best aspects of mysteries, thrillers, and dramas, offering up a revenge tale 70 years in the making, one whose secrets are not shared by the man out for revenge no matter how many times he reads the letter explaining it all to him.
