Plot
In 1991, a young girl named Ally Craig witnesses her mother Helen being mugged and fatally shot on a New York subway station platform. 10 years later, she is a student at NYU, and lives with her father Neil, a NYPD detective, in Queens. Tyler Hawkins audits classes at NYU and works at the Strand bookshop. He and his sister Caroline have a strained relationship with their workaholic businessman father, Charles.
One night, Tyler and his best friend and roommate Aidan get involved in somebody else's fight, and are arrested by Neil. Aidan calls Charles to bail Tyler out, but he refuses to talk with his father. When Aidan sees Neil dropping Ally off, he realizes she is his daughter. So, he suggests Tyler get revenge on the detective by sleeping with and dumping Ally.
Ally and Tyler go to dinner, then continue seeing each other. After noticing a tattoo on Tyler's chest reading "Michael", he reveals to her that his brother Michael committed suicide years ago; Ally later reveals about her mother’s death. Aidan turns up at Tyler's apartment, meets Ally for the first time and convinces them to go to a party.
As Ally drank too much, she stays over to sleep it off. The following morning, she tries to sneak in. However, Neil hits her when she stands up to him, Ally flees back to Tyler's apartment, where they have sex.
Caroline is a budding young artist, who is featured in an art show. She tries to get their father to attend, but he fails to show. Caroline is heartbroken, so Tyler confronts him in a boardroom filled with people. He accuses his father of willingly distancing himself from his children to avoid feeling the pain of losing another child, so father and son come to blows.
When Neil's partner recognizes Tyler with Ally on a train, Neil breaks into his apartment. Recognizing him, he discovers Tyler's initial reason for meeting Ally, so reacts violently. This forces Tyler to confess to a distraught Ally. Later, Aidan visits her at her father's home to explain it was his fault, and that Tyler is genuinely in love with her.
Caroline is bullied by classmates at a birthday party, where they cut off a chunk of her hair. Ally and Aidan visit Tyler's mother's apartment, where Caroline is sobbing. Tyler accompanies his sister back to school, and following further bullying, he reacts violently and is arrested. Charles again bails out his son, but this time vows to exert his power over the school's board of trustees to force the bullies to leave. Charles asks Tyler to meet his lawyers at his office.
Tyler spends the night with Ally, and they declare their love for each other. The next morning, Charles avises Tyler he will be late, as he is taking Caroline to school. Happy their dad is spending time with his sister, he tells him he will wait in his office. Looking on Charles's computer, Tyler sees a slideshow of pictures with him and his siblings when they were younger.
Caroline arrives at her classroom, where the teacher writes the date as Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Tyler looks out the window of his father's office, which is revealed to be located on the north edge of the 101st floor in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
As the camera pans over the characters observing the September 11 attacks and the rubble from the World Trade Center, a voice-over of Tyler's diary declares his love for Michael, forgiving him for killing himself. Tyler, who is killed in the attacks, is buried next to his brother.
Some time later, Caroline and Charles seem to have a healthy father-daughter relationship, Aidan, who has since gotten a tattoo of Tyler's name on his arm, is working hard in college, and Ally, who has not ridden the subway since Helen was killed, gets on a train at the same station where she died.
Reception
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 26% of 136 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The site's critics' consensus reads, "Its leads are likeable, but Remember Me suffers from an overly maudlin script and a borderline offensive final twist." [7] Metacritic gives it a weighted average score of 40 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". [8] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale. [9]
Todd McCarthy gave the film a mixed review in Variety , writing, "The modestly scaled film delivers some moving and affecting moments amid a preponderance of scenes of frequently annoying people behaving badly." [10] Andrea Gronvall gave a similar assessment in The Chicago Reader , writing, "Allen Coulter directed this morose and sluggish drama, which gets more mileage from Pattinson's anguished profile than from Will Fetters's thunderously overwritten screenplay." [11] Derek Malcolm wrote in the London Evening Standard , "Decently shot and directed as it is, it lacks any real flame." [12] Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a positive review, stating the "scenes between Pattinson and de Ravin exude genuine charm." Honeycutt goes on to say that the score and cinematography brought "notable sparkle to this heartfelt drama." [13]
Jake Coyle of the Associated Press did not favor the film and said the "most pleasing thing about [the film] is its boldness. It may be affected, but [it] is at least aiming for an intriguing character study — a positive sign in the young career of Pattinson," who he says steps away from " Twilight , apparently in search of his Five Easy Pieces or Rebel Without a Cause ." [14] Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a D+, calling it a "shameless contraption of ridiculously sad things befalling attractive people." Schwarzbaum was also critical of Pattinson's acting and the script. [15] Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe gave the film a half star out of four, commenting that the film "crassly repurposes tragedy to excuse its clichés." [16]
Several critics also found the movie's invocation of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center offensive and exploitative, such as Lisa Kennedy of The Denver Post , who wrote, "The finale manages to be tasteful and exploitative at the same time. It touts forgiveness while being mildly infuriating. Such is the danger of borrowing from the enormous to merely entertain. If that. Forgettable should be the last thing a movie touching on the events of 9/11 should be. Yet, 'Remember Me' is just that." [17] Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News also denounced the film's ending, writing, "There's no shame in exploring tragedy through art. But exploiting it to make your very ordinary movie feel more important? That's another story." [18]
Roger Ebert generally liked the film, giving it three out of four stars and characterizing it as a "well-made movie. I cared about the characters. I felt for them. Liberate them from the plot's destiny, which is an anvil around their necks, and you might have something" but goes on to say it "tries to borrow profound meaning, but succeeds only in upstaging itself so overwhelmingly that its characters become irrelevant". [19]
