Venice Review: Atom Egoyan's 'Remember' With Christopher Plummer, Bruno Ganz, Dean Norris And Martin Landau
If there's a reason, aside from the obvious physical ones, that we haven't had too many oldster revenge thrillers, perhaps it's that revenge as a concept seems one that age, experience and accruing wisdom might reconsider. After all, living well is the best revenge, if not exactly the most cinematic. But the irresistible premise of Atom Egoyan's "Remember," in which Christopher Plummer plays Zev, a German Jew pushing 90, who embarks on a hunt for the Auschwitz Block Commander responsible for the murder of his family during the Holocaust, justifies the shelving of this concern with what should be a compelling and moving further twist: Zev is not only frail in body, he is frail in mind and memory. So whatever it was that kept him from taking action before now is no longer an issue: his senile dementia has caused him to forget it. The pathos of this situation is clear, the stakes, which obviously involve genocide, justice and actual Nazis, are sky high and Plummer is completely...