Director: Allen Coulter (episodes of HBO series including "Boardwalk Empire" and "The Sopranos")
Writer: William Fetters ("The Lucky One" starring Zac Efron & Taylor Schilling)
Cast:
Tyler Hawkins- Robert Pattinson
Caroline Hawkins, Tyler's younger sister- Ruby Jerins
Mr. Hawkins- Pierce Brosnan
Ally Craig- Emilie de Ravin
Ally's father- Chris Cooper
Tyler's roommate Aidan- Tate Ellington
Write-up:
Spoilers first...
Robert Pattinson dies at the end.
In 9/11.
Opening Remarks
Of course this movie was promoted and distributed by Summit Entertainment. They figured they'd capitalize on Robert Pattinson's growing popularity (as he was playing Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies) and advertise this during "New Moon."
The trailer is also appears on the DVD...
It's a given that whenever I'm crazy about a certain actor, I need to see them in everything... at least for a while. I didn't look into the story of this movie at all. I just had to see it because he was in it.
And just like he always had (Harry Potter GOF, Twilight), he made me fall in love with him. Damn him for putting me through all this :P
And I also fell in love with the characters because the writing for this movie was just so good. His friend/roommate Aidan I found to be funny and engaging. The dude is a bit of an idiot, though. He suggested he hook up with this girl because they got into some trouble with her cop father.
And the girl, Ally... the writing for her, I found so fascinating. Because she's the type of girl who likes to eat dessert first. On the off-chance that a meteor will crash into the restaurant where they're dining, she doesn't want to put off her last indulgence.
There's a reason why, according to the trivia I read, this was one of the most liked unmade scripts in 2008. Several of the characters are so unique, you're not likely to find them anywhere else. Particularly Ally and Tyler's sister Caroline.
I had a number of reasons to be upset with the ending... but one of them was the fact I fell in love with these characters, really enjoyed spending time with them and I wanted to see what became of them after the credits rolled. That doesn't happen to me very often.
Neither does the fact that the moment I saw "Tuesday September 11 2001" on that chalkboard gave me an uneasy feeling and I literally cried "Oh no!" when I saw that Tyler Hawkins's father's office where he was waiting for him was located in the Twin Towers.
That's one of the most visceral movie-going experiences I ever had and that stayed with me for at least a week. One of the ushers as we were leaving the mall theater asked my mom and I how we liked it and I said "It was great" amid tears.
The first phase of my grieving process was running down to FYE to buy a copy of "New Moon"... Robert Pattinson leaves in that movie, but there's always the satisfaction that he always comes back in the end.
Last year on 9/11 I watched that movie to remember that... and to make up for the fact the TV people still haven't gotten the fact that they need to play this movie on 9/11... they never do.
More on the Characters
I saw the trailer at least 2 times before it came out and I remembered so many of the lines... yeah, I have an uncanny memory.
The opening line was Tyler quoting Gandhi "Whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it's very important that you do it because no one else will." And another quote from Tyler's brother who committed suicide 7 years earlier: "our fingerprints don't fade from the lives we touch."
That's the main message I got out of this movie. We get 9/11 as the emotional backdrop of course, but it's a sentiment that I found very compelling in this movie.
If not for Tyler's actions, the people whose lives he touched would be different or in the case of one of them, they might not even be here .
We see an interesting contrast between fathers: Tyler's and Caroline's as well as Ally's. How they deal with their grief and how it affected who they become.
The opening scene takes place in a subway 10 years earlier with the Twin Towers in the background. Her mom was murdered in front of her by two thugs.
With Tyler's brother's suicide, he blames his father because he started working for him when his music career wasn't working out. But it's easy for him to blame him because his father is a workaholic and not present for his sister- the reason why she believes he doesn't like her... the truth is he's probably more upset at his brother because he never explained why he did it.
Then with Ally's father- he'd been a cop for as long as she's been alive. Their relationship seems to be okay until she starts spending time with Tyler.
He meets Tyler and Aidan when Tyler takes on a bunch of thugs after they come out of a bar with two girls from Miami. The girls vouch for their innocence so they are released from their handcuffs. But when Tyler tries to convince him that only two of the four guys in handcuffs should be arrested, he gets thrown in jail along with Aidan.
You don't really see Ally's father as the protective type until she starts spending more time away from home. He goes as far to get his precinct involved in finding out where she is. A little bit of a rift forms between them because Ally accuses him of being overprotective because he regrets not being able to save her mom. He slaps her and she makes the decision to spend time at Tyler's place to get some separation from him.
I do get the protective part. You lost your wife in a shooting so you're protective of your daughter because you don't want to go through that loss again. But it's another thing where you actually break into her boyfriend's home to give him a message to stay away from her or saying that once she finds out how they know each other, she'll leave him.
I don't care if Tyler and Aidan really don't have a deadbolt on their apartment- he's a cop that's breaking and entering. That is a crime.
Tyler may not know what to do with his own life, but he's the best big brother that Caroline could ever have. He always looks out for her and makes sure that she's happy- if it's within his power. While he is mad at his father about his brother's suicide, he does want to make sure he doesn't forget about her.
Sometimes he does go about it the wrong way, but his heart is always in the right place. And his actions do "change the course of history" as it were.
If you read between the lines, you do see in a few scenes that Tyler's father does want to be there for his kids, but because he's the CEO of his own business- I believe it's a law firm of some kind- he has to work a lot. Even when he doesn't want to.
Caroline is another of those young precocious characters that sometimes seem too smart for their own good. But she's separated from the typical stereotype because she's also an artist and she's being bullied by the other girls in school.
I mean, there is a scene where she's invited to another girl's birthday sleepover and she calls her mom to take her home because one of the girls cuts off her hair. It's really heart wrenching to see the scene afterwards where her mom and stepfather are calling people to get something done about it and it doesn't seem like anything will be done. Because it didn't happen on school grounds and the other girls claim she did it to herself.
I mean, seriously? What the fuck is wrong with these kids that they have to torture her like that? Just because she's a little different from the rest of them with her artistic abilities?
Because Tyler loves his sister so much, he takes her to school the following day and causes some havoc to scare the girls away from hurting her again... he not only gets thrown in jail, but his father bails him out, says that he took care of things with the board of trustees and Tyler has to meet with the lawyers in his office the following Tuesday.
But the crux of everything: their dad decides on that one day to take Caroline to school, so Tyler and his assistant are waiting for him in his office... if not for Tyler's actions, their dad would have died in 9/11 instead of him.
Whether or not he would have taken Caroline to school that day without Tyler's "interference," who really knows?
But within minutes of the attacks, Tyler sees on his dad's computer pictures of him and his siblings... so he died knowing that their dad really cared about all of them.
To that, I can relate a bit too. My dad worked a lot and spent a lot of time away from home traveling for his business... so when I was younger, it wasn't as clear that he cared and the fact he was the disciplinarian. But as we got older, it became a little more obvious that he did. Especially when we found more things in common when I grew older.
Robert Pattinson
Anyone who really didn't care about him as an actor would say he's not different than a moody teenager in this movie. He's a 21-22 year old that really doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. Therefore, he's kind of uninteresting.
But in this movie in particular... yes he is moody and a little impulsive at times. But his heart is always in the right place. It might not come off that way to people not willing to see who he really is, but he isn't as bad as they'd want to think.
He also has this dry sense of humor, which is kind of nice. There's one scene from the trailer where he lights up a cigarette in his dad's lobby. He goes to a crystal bowl on one side of the room, thinking it's an ashtray. Then when they tell him he can't smoke in there and it is, in fact, a bowl that "completes the room" his response is "I guess it was just there to tease me."
No person is completely perfect... Edward Cullen may seem gorgeous, but I do acknowledge he has some shortcomings. Especially in Robert Pattinson's performance [and the fact he has golden eyes and pale skin]. But for whatever reason, I don't know what it is... if there is a version of him I'd like to freeze in time and keep him exactly as he is ALIVE- it would be his "Remember Me" character.
Something about his look in this particular, I just fawn over. He'd never looked finer.
Final Remarks
Emilie de Ravin, I enjoyed in this performance. But later on, I would get to know her as Belle on "Once Upon a Time" where she gets to keep somewhat of an accent. (She's from Australia originally... and to be fair, her American accent and Robert Pattinson's aren't bad in this movie at all).
My one nitpick about her is that she has blue eyes... Belle in the Disney movie was brown hair and brown eyes like me... so it's harder for me to directly relate when she doesn't even have the same eye color as me.
Today I found the movie online- the first time I'd seen in 5 years... I don't think I'll be able to make a tradition out of seeing this movie every year. First because the end is still heart-wrenching. Second because I don't want to lose that feeling.
After seeing this movie, a few weeks later, I had a dream where Robert Pattinson and I had a normal conversation... nothing really spectacular. But it inspired me to write a short story where I explored what it'd be like for someone who lost a loved one in such an event. The event I wound up choosing was taking place in the Iraq war. Still in high school, the protagonist mourns her fiancé's death in the war and finds love again in a doppleganger who starts going to her school. I'd thought about doing a follow-up story where she meets someone whose life her fiancé saved in the war... but it hadn't come to pass.
But what I do on 9/11: this movie was the first time I really felt something about that event. I was only 15 at the time and my priorities really weren't really straight. Heck, I didn't know until I got home that the World Trade Center WAS the Twin Towers...
I may not watch a Robert Pattinson movie (whether it be this one, Harry Potter GOF or New Moon) every year, but I do listen to some Daughtry.
"Open up your eyes" captures for me the sorrow I felt seeing this movie ending.
And I also found this video... it's really poignant. This is my third year watching it on 9/11.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdbxvtzT92Y
Depeche Mode playing "Enjoy the Silence" on the Twin Towers...
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