Remember Me begins with the murder of one person and ends with the murder of some 2700 people, but--in the context of this movie, anyway--we are expected to care about only one of the latter.
Nearly a decade after the events of 9/11, I suppose it's now OK to appropriate those events in the service of art, as long as the end result isn't overly exploitative or sensationalized. However, the terrorist attacks of that day remain terrorist attacks, and as such they were acts of a political nature, but Remember Me is not a political movie. In fact, if politics can be defined generally as the overarching bureaucratic relations among the citizens in a given society and its governing body, then Remember Me is the exact opposite of a political movie. It deals, primarily, with the intimate, personal interactions between family members and loved ones.
On the other hand, perhaps the movie is a close approximation of what it must have felt like to have lost a loved one on 9/11. The individuals in and around the World Trade Center towers, and those on the planes, were not political agents, they were civilians. In this way, Robert Pattinson's character, Tyler Hawkins, mirrored hundreds of other people who died that day: They lived their lives, as varied as those lives were, and then they were killed for reasons that had nothing to do with them personally. Their lives up to that moment had no authentic relation to the despicable political actions that led to their deaths. As such, the movie's denouement is pretty effective as a portrayal of this senseless loss of life.
But although the death-toll from that day is staggeringly large when compared to other events of this nature, the victims and their immediate families comprise a relatively small portion of the population. One could argue that, because the movie harnessed the terrible power of 9/11 only in its last few minutes of screen-time, it appropriated the pain of a few individuals for the sake of a story that was not about 9/11 at all (except inasmuch as the movie was a story about the loss of loved ones, and how such losses affect those left behind).*
Imagine From Here to Eternity if, instead of a private in the Army, Montgomery Clift played a civilian boxer who was merely visiting his father on an Army base, which turned out to be Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941--but the audience didn't find this out until the last two minutes of the film.
When Titanic was in theaters I remember some people complained that it exploited its subject matter. The RMS Titanic had a finite number of victims (1517), yet the movie focused on two fictional people who were not actually on-board the vessel when it sank. Why didn't James Cameron focus on some of the actual victims or survivors of this historical event? Personally, I don't share this objection to the film, primarily because of some of the ways in which its approach differs from Remember Me: First, Titanic is a movie about the disaster and deals directly with the people and events that caused the disaster. True, these events are subplots to the primary (and completely fictional) plot of the movie, but it also deals with the people who were on-board and who lost their lives--even if the portrayals of those individuals were mostly fictional as well. Finally, Titanic was released 85 years after the actual sinking of the Titanic, at which point there were only a few remaining survivors--all of whom had been less than a few years old when the Titanic sank and had no memories of the event.
September 11, 2001, however, is still very much in everyone's minds. In addition to the thousands who lost their lives, that day eventually led to two wars that are still taking place,** which have each resulted in thousands of additional lives lost. Perhaps even moreso than Pearl Harbor, the attacks of 9/11 irrevocably altered the course of history. It's such an awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) event that, even nine years later, it's hard to completely wrap my mind around exactly what it means. Is an event of such incredible power well-served by being tacked onto an otherwise personal story about a young man seeking to reconnect his family with his estranged father? Was it essential that Tyler Hawkins be killed in the north tower for his death to have the impact that it does within the context of the story?
Regardless of this nagging question in the back of my mind, I did enjoy the film. Much was made of Robert Pattinson's performance in the film (even if its box-office numbers were not particularly impressive), and I'm not the first to say that he reminded me, perhaps intentionally, of James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. More enjoyable, though, was his chemistry with costar Emilie De Ravin (best known for her role as Claire on Lost). In my opinion it's rare these days for romantic leads to seem like they really belong together onscreen,*** but I believed them as a couple. As Roger Ebert noted in his review, the film would have been much better if it had focused more on their relationship and less on the melodrama surrounding Hawkins and his family.
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*Though if the writer, William Fetters, lost someone in the 9/11 attacks, then this is of course a moot point.
**Despite the "end of combat operations" in Iraq, scheduled for August 31, 2010, the combat isn't over quite yet.
***Several contemporary romances (e.g., Valentine's Day, Leap Year, When in Rome, etc.) seem to have been cast strictly for the appeal of their stars as individuals, rather than as a couple.
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