  Robert Pattinson in Remember Me. |
We’ve been pointedly asked by the studio not to reveal the “shock ending” of Remember Me, the attempt by Twilight’s teenthrob vampire Robert Pattinson to expand his range into James Dean territory.
A few critics have gone ahead and done it anyway — not to be jerks, you understand, put as a purported public service, so cheap and mawkish is its use of a national tragedy that has nothing to do with the story.
It’s a device that tacks ersatz resonance onto a movie that otherwise fails to arouse such emotion in nearly two hours of screen time.
And that’s as close as I’m going to get to playing spoiler.
Director Allen Coulter admits he was channeling anguished-teen archetypes like Splendor In The Grass and (especially) Rebel Without A Cause in this tale of a violence-prone misunderstood youth with hair that deserves its own acting credit.
Indeed, conveying the existential angst of youth, Pattinson barely stops short of shouting James Dean’s immortal cry-from-the-soul, “You’re tearing me apart!”
Pattinson may have more ability than he shows, since Remember Me was shot in a ridiculously short window between Twilight movies, leaving him little option but to play himself. When called on to step up from charming to rip-open-my-chest emoting, he is like a B-voice American Idol diva who tackles an Aretha Franklin song. Let’s blame the pitchiness on lack of prep.
Remember Me opens in 1992 with a little girl named Ally watching her mother murdered on a subway by muggers. Later, in shock, she falls into the arms of her distraught policeman father (Chris Cooper).
Flash ahead to 2001, and we meet Tyler Hawkins, a moody book-store habitue and NYU student who — it turns out — is brooding over the suicide of his brother years before, and blaming his rich father (Pierce Brosnan) for it. Attempts by his party-animal roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington) to snap him out of it lead to a night of drunken clubbing and mouthing off at a cop (Cooper again), who beats the snot out of Tyler.
When Aidan discovers that their cop-assailant has a daughter (played as an adult by Lost’s Emilie de Ravin), he engineers some perverse matchmaking between Tyler and Ally — thus, inadvertently assuring that Tyler will continue to regularly get the snot beaten out of him by her dad, even as true love blooms.
These beatings are interspersed between showdowns with Tyler’s dad, usually taking place in boardrooms full of breakables. The subject: Dad’s indifference to his troubled 11-year-old art-prodigy daughter Caroline — winningly played by Ruby Jerins. Indeed, the tender scenes between siblings Tyler and Caroline are the closest Tyler becomes to a compelling character.
It’s worth noting that the central characters who are all New Yorkers are played by an Englishman (Pattinson), an Australian (de Ravin), an Irishman (Brosnan) and a Swede (Lena Olin as Tyler’s dishrag mom). With Brosnan, in particular, 10 minutes will go by before he noticeably tries to inflect. At that moment, you go, “Oh yeah! He’s supposed to be from the Bronx.”
It takes a lot to act horribly troubled for no obvious reason and have an audience buy it. Amiable as he is, Pattinson doesn’t attain that in Remember Me.
(This film is rated 14 A)
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca
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