Remember

Decades pass, monumental changes revitalize cultures and nations are reborn, but the past still haunts survivors with an unrelenting immediacy which cannot be forgotten, forgiven, Auschwitz's legacy, rationalized perpetual vengeance.

Atom Egoyan's Remember sombrely examines such a mindset through a series of alarming encounters which thoughtfully comment on differing degrees of punishment.

Much stronger than The Captive or Devil's Knot.

A holocaust survivor, Zev Gutman (Christopher Plummer), the last person alive who can identify a Nazi war criminal, begins a solemn journey to find him, guided by a compatriot who's too infirm to travel.

When you consider the relationship between Gutman's health and his mission, his mission itself seems profound yet reckless, he can't even remember what he's doing whenever he wakes up, obsessive testaments, pure uncompromising revenge.

The film viscerally questions Gutman's quest, apart from one sequence where a contemporary Nazi is confronted, by integrating lives lived and lost, the present, the world that bloomed after World War II's devastation ended, notably in the final scene where the oppressor is caught ensconced in his familial bower.

Daughter and granddaughter witnessing.

He could have been tried, sentenced, flushed out by an organization dedicated to convicting war criminals.

Absolutely punishing the guilty in front of the innocent through murder 70 years after they mindlessly followed totalitarian commands is not the way to move progressively forward.

Such acts ensure the perseverance of vengeance perpetually.

Remember cautiously yet capably constructs this idea.

Perhaps Kurlander (Jürgen Prochnow) wasn't mindlessly following orders, he could have been one of the psychotics, but his family remains guiltless in the film, unaware of the horrors he once unleashed.

Volatile subject matter skilfully postulated.

With the best twist I've seen in awhile.

Haunting in its drive.

Provocative.

The Captive

Generally I find ambiguity enables scripts to reflect a higher degree of realistic contemplation, for it aptly accentuates the diversity of competing/cooperating points-of-view/interpretations/motivations/. . . that compose a multidimensional cosmopolitan filmscape, internally creating open-ended multifaceted polarized exteriorizations, thereby encouraging constructive debate.

But sometimes it's nice to simply watch good versus evil, a basic opposition of hero and villain, which is why I see so many action and western films.

The best of these usually have an ambiguous dimension; while it's clear who is good and who is evil, the protagonist often has several peculiar shortcomings (quick to anger, likes drinking, is never home), and the villains often seem honourable, or at least are quite appealing.

Obviously enough.

The villains in Atom Egoyan's The Captive are not honourable or appealing.

Nor should they be.

They are revolting monstrosities to be loathed and vilified in each and every instance.

Their monstrosity causes the heroes to act violently towards one another, as historical patterns and dead-ends necessitate the investigation of particularly volatile potentialities.

There's no room for ambiguity in The Captive's case, and its greatest shortcoming could perhaps be that it didn't make its villains even more disgusting.

The controversial subject matter is perhaps too watered down to adequately reflect its wickedness, but there isn't much choice when creating works which examine these realities.

Otherwise they would be impossible to sit through.

Devil's Knot

Seemingly criminal investigative buffoonery is exactingly exposed yet authoritatively dismissed in Atom Egoyan's Devil's Knot, the lives of three teens dependent on said revelations, the law more concerned with either fabricating or submitting to superstition.

The evidence which Egoyan vets cannot lucidly resolve resulting legal tensions.

Dedicated altruistic private investigator Ron Lax (Colin Firth) resolutely prowls to defend, analyzing the facts exhaustively and judiciously, earning trust where none has ever been granted, proceeding directly, from a sense of justice.

But his team is held back by insurmountable time constraints and predetermined sentences, foregone conclusions belittlingly arresting, narcoleptic networks, propagandized anew.

The film harrowingly spawns a persisted enveloping remittance, a sublime sense of optimism institutionally dismayed, helplessness, the beautiful, the dissolute, the scapegoating of difference, a purloined procedural penitentiary.

Nothing can be proven.

Fights against overwhelming odds.

The knot represents the ways in which authorities sometimes outlaw/vilify/demonize a bohemian perspective then rely on their sanctified laurels while using the strategies of that perspective to illegitimately act.

It happens in the film anyways.

And in Foucault.

Oddly, I've been wondering recently if there's ever been a documentary film made about duty counsels and/or legal aids.

Appropriately timed thought even if Lax isn't a lawyer.

I've noticed a negative stereotype associated with the work legal aids perform which a solid documentary film and accompanying book could help destabilize.

Something like Duty Counselled.

Or something else.