Discussing “Remember Me”

So, this one was out in the theatres a while ago and I just saw it on DVD now. First, without the spoilers, all the dialogue is awful, all the characters communicate like 9-year olds, but the story is not all bad, it is just unfortunately told through a mind-numbing succession of cliches. Finally, it could be worth watching it all the way through.
It’s sort of my kind of movie; as a friend of mine has said of me once, I am attracted to strong emotions, to the tragic travesty that is human life and, most of all, to human death. The themes of loss and the psychological development of people, parent-child relationships and so on, make it pretty much my kind of movie, as my brother warned me that he didn’t like it but I might love it. But whether or not you are prone to feeling “tricked” in the screening room, or enter it with a combative attitude, seeking to “prove the movie wrong” as if the movie and you were not on the same side, I say watch it just so you form your opinion on it, because it presents a peculiar plot element, interestingly employed.
This is where you, who have not watched the film yet, should stop reading, for there will be spoilers from here on. If you don’t care, read on.
Tyler is about to turn 22, six years after his brother had hanged himself on his own 22nd birthday. He is all pissed off at his father, he watches his younger sister slowly enter her teens and start losing what is left of her innocence and developing the mental health issues that he himself knows so well. He is mortified to see his father pretend to ignore the fact that his eldest son has killed himself, and to feel completely powerless to change any of that.
So he meets Emilie de Ravin’s character, who is unfortunately a blank. She witnessed her mother’s killing by a mugger when she was 10, which by the end of the film seems like an arbitrary insertion of a previous random violent tragedy in her own life, to perhaps justify her emotional connection with Tyler, and to intensify the ending a bit. Nothing of her character is really played out in any more than weird set-ups like her never riding the subway (because the murder took place at a subway station), and her very strange habit of eating dessert before her main course (because she might die during the main course and not get to the part of the meal that she wanted the most, to which Tyler aptly replies “Is that probable?”).
Anyway, they tumble about for a while, there is the annoying set-up that gets its pay-off way too late, with Emilie’s father being the cop that arrested Tyler in the beginning. That was just pathetic, or maybe it was cleverly intended for moviegoers to go on their bathroom breaks and not miss any of the story. Actually, probably some lame-ass studio executive said something like “ok, ‘boy meets girl, boy gets girl’… where is ‘boy loses girl, boy gets her back’?”… Poor screenwriters…
But on to what’s important, the ending. I think the way Tyler and his father sort of reconcile is alright, it could be a lot worse. Then there is a bit of redemption, not that the movie will let you chew on that for very long… So, the september 11th thing it totally exploitative, like really shamefully, sort of… But it kind of works. And, in a way, it is interesting. I can really see people who maybe lived in New York City on the day or people who were very personally affected by it will just sob like crazy.
What happens is, with something like that, you kind of instantly transport the story into the real world, and all the people who have their own pre-conceived emotional reaction to 9/11 will immediately transfer their real world feelings into the film. Maybe you argue that that’s cheating, that’s too easy, but more interesting is the fact that it works. Probably even those who say it is cheating or explotative or whatever did have some emotional reaction of their own, otherwise they wouldn’t say it’s cheating, they’d just slip right by it. And ultimately, it may not always be this blatant, but whenever a movie makes you cry, it’s because you’ve projected your real world feelings into the story, and that’s very good.
But there is a trade-off to using a “cheap trick” like that to get the tears flowing, probably the reason writers should want to avoid resorting to this kind of tool, unless rent is due or something like that. The movie becomes irrevocably dated. People in future generations will just not see it the same way, we will tell our kids about oh what a big deal it was, how shocking for everyone the world over, the epitome of gratuitous violent aggression, the mass experience of the murder of innocents, people who were there will tell their stories but, however Hollywood may try in the years to come, the future will have none of it and someone older will have to explain to them what the ending means, until there will be no one left to explain it. When it comes to today, though, I forgive the cheap tricks, as long as they work well enough, which this one does.