What can you say about a girl of 21 whose mother died? That she was young and beautiful and that she loved dessert, the Big Apple and Robert Pattinson.
OK, so I’m clearly no match for the late Erich Segal. The point is that Remember Me is a romance in the vein of Love Story – not so much with the whole fatal-illness subplot, but in its story of a sensitive, slumming rich boy (Twilight’s chief vampire, Pattinson) who falls for an impossibly winsome working-class lass (Emilie de Ravin of TV’s Lost) against the glittery backdrop of New York City. It’s sappier than maples in March, which means some folks will lap it up while others may suffer a kind of moviegoing diabetes.
The movie opens on a Brooklyn subway platform in 1991. A little girl sees her mother mugged and then murdered before her eyes. Later, her police-officer father (Chris Cooper) shows up to set the mood of keening grief that rolls like a wave through the movie.
Cut to “10 years later.” (Briefly cut to me trying to figure out if this is before or after 9/11, then giving up.) The little girl, Ally, is now played by de Ravin, and attending the same college as Tyler Hawkins (Pattinson). Tyler is nursing his own wounded soul, and although it will be a while before the details are revealed, he wears his broken heart on his sleeve.
After Tyler and his goofball roommate get arrested for mouthing off to a cop (no points for guessing which one), the troubled youngster strikes up a relationship with the arresting officer’s daughter. The family connections are convenient – Ally’s dad can have him jailed, but Tyler’s dad (Pierce Brosnan) is a big-shot Wall Street lawyer who posts bail without a second thought. In fact, he doesn’t generally give even a first thought to his offspring, which include the clichéd precocious 11-year-old daughter (Ruby Jerins).
In fact, between the preoccupied dad and the whip-smart sister, Tyler’s life unfolds like something out of a movie – which is seldom a good idea when it’s also unfolding in an actual movie. He and Ally bond over a shared sense of loss and the unfairness of the world, while Cooper’s character flails about at losing his only daughter to another man. The young couple have a demure roll in the hay that ends in a tasteful blackout. You know the score.
Allen Coulter, whose directing career encompasses a lot of TV and the 2006 Ben Affleck film Hollywoodland, does an admirable job of shooting New York as an additional character alongside the human co-stars. And the acting is uniformly excellent, with Pattinson proving he can emote without the aid of immortality and sparkly skin, and de Ravin shrugging off her Claire character from Lost. If Remember Me is intended to tell casting directors, “remember me as someone other than my last/most famous role,” it’s a success.
Unfortunately, CSA members are likely to represent only the tiniest minority at screenings. The rest of us are interested in story, and the script, by first- time screenwriter Will Fetters, seems content to push the various romance buttons with all the enthusiasm of an accountant working a calculator. You could set your watch by the timing of the innocent lie, the misunderstanding, the spat, the speech, the reconciliation, etc.
Your timepiece won’t warn you of the film’s final twist, however, which left this critic fuming. “Violation of trust” might be too strong a term for what happens at the end of Remember Me, if only because I hadn’t invested all that much trust in the first place. Nevertheless, it feels as though a rule has been broken, and the unwritten law of cinema is that you have to be a much better movie than this one before you go breaking rules. ½
THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN
REMEMBER ME
