"Remember Me" Movie review

The problems with "Remember Me, starring Robert Pattinson — the vampire Edward Cullen of "Twilight" — aren't the heartthrob's fault.

Even if they were, it's hard to imagine the "Gossip Girl" or "Twilight" demographic this PG-13 romantic drama seems tailored for necessarily caring.

No, the missteps in this story of two lovers from different classes drawn together by grief are due to ambitions not quite met.

First-time screenwriter Will Fetters wanted to mix the personal and the historical. Director Allen Coulter and his cast, which includes heavy hitters Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper and Lena Olin, want to give new audiences an affair to remember, in part by setting it in an unforgettable year — 2001.

Ghosts haunt the characters, but more consequential spirits hang over the movie.

Melancholy and suppressed fury permeate the story.

On a subway platform, an 11-year-old girl watches as her mother is shot. Ten years later, Ally (Emilie de Ravin) sits in a global politics course at New York University. Also in the class is Tyler Hawkins (Pattinson). Ally lives in Queens with her father, a New York City police detective played by Cooper.

A mopey, chain-smoking slacker, Tyler rooms with Aidan (Tate Ellington), a mildly randy chatterbox. Tyler carries a tattered copy of Keats in his back pocket, stocks shelves at the famous Strand used-book store.

He also keeps a notebook that is an extended conversation with his older brother Michael, who committed suicide.

Did we mention Tyler is a trust- fund scion who turned his back on Dad's money? While that may force him to ride a bike and live in a tenement with a faulty deadbolt, it doesn't stop him from giving into the mood swings and jabs of an entitled kid.

Though Tyler and Ally share a class — no, not socioeconomic class — they don't meet cute. They meet intentionally icky.

We won't give it away, but it has to do with Ally's father and a some ill-conceived payback.

The plan goes rather too well and Tyler falls, opening his heart to tough and tender working-class survivor Ally.

If it sounds a little pat, too often it is, although de Ravin carries a nice early moment playing a girl who's not a sucker for a line offered by a curiously handsome guy.

They are two wounded birds flapping toward each other, and Pattinson and de Ravin make a sweet enough pair of cooing, coupling doves.

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