'Remember Me' cast lifts gloomy look at love

"Remember Me" opens in 2003, with a mother being killed in a New York subway station - as her young daughter watches in horror.

The ensuing film is a romantic melodrama that is being depicted in TV ads as a kind of addenda to vampire-boy Robert Pattinson's seduction of 13-year-old girls around the world (as well, one suspects, of a number of older women, too).

The film is a good deal more ambitious and complex than you'd expect. Its climax is even more shattering, and shocking, than its opener. In between, we get a good deal of brooding contemplation about the nature of young love and how callow adults simply don't understand.

The real revelation is that Pattinson can act. His character's rebellion against his rich, powerful father, played by Pierce Brosnan, is no less severe than those scenes with James Dean and Raymond Massey in "East of Eden."

Pattinson plays Tyler Hawkins, 21, a New York University student who quotes poetry and sits alone at restaurants working on his notebook. Deep, dark looks smolder from beneath bushy eyebrows. He dangles a cigarette from his mouth just as Bogey might have.

He's a movie star, but he's also an actor with staying power.

Tyler's put off by a world in which his brother committed suicide and his father ignores him. Trying to stop a street fight, he's detained and embarrassed by a police officer played by the always-mystic and distant Chris Cooper.

When he meets Cooper's daughter, a fellow student at NYU, he pursues and dates her to get back at her bullying father. Of course, they fall in love.

Allen Coulter directs with a serious consistency that makes this melodrama play much better than it sounds.

There is an impressive supporting cast, led by Emilie de Ravin from TV's "Lost," who more than holds her own as the feisty NYU student who is street-smart in the way a cop's daughter should be. She's daddy's girl but is intent upon establishing her independence. Cooper's intensity suggests something almost perverse in his protection of her.

Brosnan is all bombast and arrogance, but he is adept at suggesting the kind of powerful wealth that demands obedience.

Especially effective is young Ruby Jerins as Tyler's kid sister. If "Field of Dreams" is the movie for father and son, this is the movie for brother and sister. Their relationship threatens to steal the thunder from the more routine love affair.

This melodrama marches relentlessly toward one of the more shattering finales in recent filmdom. It's not so much a surprise as a kind of inevitable reminder that the traumas as well as the joys of life are capricious.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com