REMEMBER ME

A perfect film, say my companions, and I can’t help but agree. Where to begin? With summary, the very lie this film exposes? Hamlet or It’s Complicated, thunderous as they are, both sound silly over a beer. If I told you that the hero (Team Edward!) is a 21-year-old bad-boy cigarette-smoking semi-college-dropout and would-be writer who works at the Strand, plays Holden to his sister’s Phoebe and his suicide older brother’s Seymour (I know, but…), hates his chilly dad (Brosnan), and falls for a girl whose mother (Plimpton) was killed a decade before in a Brooklyn subway mugging-gone-wrong and whose father is a cop who arrests our hero in a meatpacking-district brawl leading the hero to later realize the cop’s daughter is in his Global Politics class at NYU and they fall in lip-mashing love and get both their fathers to marginally improve—what am I really telling you? Would you be more or less inclined to believe that the final five minutes find our hero, his problems seemingly resolved, looking out the window of his lawyer-father’s opulent office which the camera zooms out to reveal occupies a high floor of WTC 1 even as we cut to the little sister’s teacher writing on a blackboard “Today is Tuesday, September 11, 2001”? Then back to the towers rendered in dazzling CGI—were they ever anything but? The ash a ghoulish film crew shook over the rooftop set where the girl and the hero’s roommate rush out, look up, and react.

A “cop out,” as the marquee no longer reads? But earlier, an un-telegraphed cut to a scene from American Pie disorients us until it’s revealed that the principals are watching it on a period movie screen. The lesson’s clear: the god in the machine can switch the reel anytime. You’re Orestes, you’re an awkward young guy, you avenge your dickish dad and the Furies come smelling like blood and garbage, you stagger down shadowy streets until Athena: “Everyone Cut The Shit.” What could have more meaning than that? Did you think your life wasn’t undeserved reprieves, and sudden death? I know, I know, the lie of form. You work really hard and do nice things for people and then good things happen. Or you’re really bad and then, sure sure sure, in a special underground torture chamber (that’s located where, exactly?) you have to pay the bill.