Toronto Sun: ‘Remember Me’ alive with emotion

There is an ele­phant in the room, metaphor­i­cally. He is a most hand­some, most famous, most per­plex­ing ele­phant. His name is Robert Pat­tin­son, a super­star among Twi-hards who fol­low his every breath­less, blood­less moment in the Twi­light series.

But “the room” is an Amer­i­can indie film called Remem­ber Me, beau­ti­fully crafted with an air of thought­ful melan­choly by direc­tor Allen Coul­ter. This is the story of a New York uni­ver­sity stu­dent estranged from his wealthy father, in trou­ble with cops, and intrigued by the daugh­ter of one detec­tive who has already smashed his face in dur­ing an alley fight. The film just debuted on DVD fol­low­ing its mod­est the­atri­cal run, timed to coin­cide with Friday’s release of The Twi­light Saga: Eclipse.

In Remem­ber Me, Pat­tin­son gets to play a real human being in a roman­tic drama pop­u­lated by other func­tion­ing humans. They are flawed, com­plex, inter­est­ing peo­ple played by Pierce Bros­nan, Chris Cooper, Lena Olin, won­der­ful child actress Ruby Jerins and Aus­tralian dis­cov­ery Emile de Ravin as the object of Pattinson’s burn­ing desire. No one drinks blood, although this saga is rife with tragedy.

Coul­ter, a New Yorker, is on the phone explain­ing how Pat­tin­son, already cast in the first Twi­light, was eager to find an anti­dote — some­thing rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent — even before its release. Exec­u­tives at Sum­mit Enter­tain­ment, pro­duc­ers of Twi­light, were look­ing to help out.

“Hon­estly,” Coul­ter recalls of an early lun­cheon meet­ing with Pat­tin­son, “he was not known, Twi­light had not been released and there was no way to see it. We just knew he was inter­ested. Sit­ting in front of us was a guy who was scruffy, intense, charm­ing, unpretentious.”

Pat­tin­son was freshly returned from Mex­ico and aston­ished because he had been besieged “by 50 girls at the air­port,” future Twi-hards who knew him from pre-release pub­lic­ity. “Lit­tle did he know that this was not even the tip of the tip of the ice­berg,” Coul­ter says, laugh­ing. “Nor did we.”

After lunch, Coul­ter told pro­ducer Nicholas Osborne: “I don’t know why but I have the instinct that this guy could do it.” It would also clinch the pro­duc­tion deal because Sum­mit would com­mit to the $16 mil­lion bud­get. “Clearly,” Coul­ter says now, “that’s not lost on a direc­tor. That cer­tainly gets your atten­tion. But, if we didn’t think he was right, we would have said no.”

The “yes” came, Coul­ter recalls, “because he seemed to under­stand the role. He had the kind of scruffy attrac­tive­ness we needed and a hid­den inten­sity. He was kind of secre­tive in a way that I thought was kind of inter­est­ing, given who his char­ac­ter is and how he’s con­flicted about his father. So we said: ‘Let’s just take a flier!’

“It was after that I saw Twi­light and had to admit that, if I had seen it before, just because it is so rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent, I might have hesitated.”

The Twi­light films, Coul­ter says, are like silent movies and Pat­tin­son is like 1920s star Rudolf Valentino. Pat­tin­son was also about to go viral. “It might have given me pause because some­one that famous brings a cer­tain amount of baggage.”

One prob­lem now might be type­cast­ing. “There will be peo­ple who can­not accept that this young man is doing some­thing dif­fer­ent from Twi­light,” Coul­ter says. “Or they may have an atti­tude about Twi­light and about his fame, about his face being on the cover of mag­a­zines, and that may influ­ence how they see the movie.

“That is some­thing that, in my opin­ion, the movie will out­live and, at that point, peo­ple will sim­ply see it as a young man in a role. And, in my opin­ion, I think he is per­fect for the role.”

Amer­i­cans not in the mood

Remem­ber Me, which co-stars Robert Pat­tin­son and Emile de Ravin along with a rogues gallery of great char­ac­ter actors, is a roman­tic tragedy — not a roman­tic com­edy. That already makes it dif­fer­ent from most Hol­ly­wood movies, espe­cially with its melan­cholic mood.

“I didn’t think of it as dar­ing,” says Amer­i­can direc­tor Allen Coul­ter. “But it’s not a mood that most Amer­i­cans nec­es­sar­ily sign up for. I just thought it was true to the story.”

Indeed, Amer­i­cans did not sign up. Remem­ber Me earned $55 mil­lion world­wide, just $19 mil­lion of that in North Amer­ica despite the star power of Twi­light star Pat­tin­son (he was cast before Twi­light was released and became famous dur­ing the Remem­ber Me shoot). Remem­ber Me, like other chal­leng­ing films that look at youth romance in an intel­li­gent way, is now look­ing for its audi­ence on DVD.

Remem­ber Me includes ref­er­ence to 9/11. “It just seemed like the ulti­mate ver­sion of what this whole story was about,” Coul­ter says, “which is the event that shat­ters your life and changes its direc­tion. It was a gam­ble, to be hon­est, and one that I wres­tled with really until the film was fin­ished. But it was a gam­ble that I was also will­ing to take.”

Any Amer­i­can film­maker who even men­tions 9/11 within a fic­tional story is tak­ing a risk because many peo­ple are still so sen­si­tive about the sub­ject. “For some, it was some­thing that they wish I had not done,” Coul­ter admits. “And, for oth­ers, I think it worked in the way I intended. But every­body felt the need to be as respect­ful and del­i­cate as possible.”

VancouverSun

via letmesign and ToR