Remember 

Cast: Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Dean Morris, Jürgen Prochnow

Director: Atom Egoyan

1hr 35 min

In Hebrew, the name Zev means “wolf,” but the protagonist of Atom Egoyan’s new film, Remember, is more like a lamb. Zev Gutman strikes no predatory impressions when we first meet him lying still in bed, calling out his dead wife’s name in a state of delusion. He cuts a feeble figure - he doesn’t wear the countenance of a ruthless killer, and yet killing has become the sole purpose of what remains of his life. Remember is about the Holocaust, but at its heart it is a revenge film. Zev (Christopher Plummer) is manipulated by his equally ageing friend, Max (Martin Landau). Both men survived the horrors of Auschwitz, and in the present tense they live in the same nursing home, where Max has recruited Zev to act as his agent in a mission of vengeance. Max has discovered that the man responsible for killing his and Zev’s families in the camp resides in North America and under an assumed name: Rudy Kurlander—though by a terrible stroke of fortune there happen to be four men to check out, each sharing the name. So Max, stuck in a wheelchair and hooked up to an oxygen tank, sends Zev off by train bus and taxi to buy a gun and then figure out which of the quartet is indeed the doomed Rudy Kurlander and to summarily execute him.

Zev makes his way through the USA and across the border into Canada in search of his quarry. It’s a fine enough premise - Zev suffers from dementia, and repeatedly throughout his journey has to stop to get his bearings. His main guide is a handwritten letter from Max that he refers to whenever he finds himself lost in his own mind, and as he forgets himself so often, we start to lose track as well. Is this a man out to avenge his family, or a doddering old fogey who should have never set foot outside his nursing home? Each time Zev approaches a Rudy Kurlander, he is confronting the truth and solving an equation where a wrong answer possibly means the death of an innocent man. Should that kind of power and responsibility be placed in the hands of a person who can’t even remember that his wife has passed away?

Egoyan does well however, in milking the gun-purchasing detail for a commentary on America’s heinous relationship with firearms. Zev is stopped by a security guard while out shopping, and the guard searches his bags only to find that Zev is packing a substantial weapon. Instead of doing something about it, the guard comes over all nostalgic  “Gee – that reminds me of my first gun!” The contrast between Zev’s infirmity and the bloody nature of his purpose makes Remember a fairly appealing morality piece. When Dean Norris arrives to play the Nazi son of one of Zev’s potential targets, it is the film’s best and most dread-inducing sequence, and it has to be said how much of a joy it is to watch the outstanding work here of Christopher Plummer, one of the screen’s greatest actors and a sight to behold in this role. There is a thin line separating tasteless portraits of mental illness from affectingly human ones, and Plummer never crosses it. He is a marvel in conveying Zev’s anguish—over his history, over the loss of his wife, over the task he has been charged with—in nuanced flourishes: a nervous glance here, a tremble of the chin there, a furrowing of the brow there, and his accent is also wonderful. Sadly though, all this talent is wasted by a third-section turn that’s just preposterous, due to the direction it takes once Plummer reaches the final Rudy (played by Jürgen Prochnow). What follows is an embarrassingly tone-deaf climax to what had earlier been an interesting premise.