If you don't remember the movie, that's okay, most people don't. It wasn't popular enough to sustain a place in the annual Hallmark/Lifetime holiday movie rotation, and even I haven't seen it for so long, that I'm sure I've long since forgotten some of the secondary characters.
What I won't forget about Always Remember I Love You is the way the movie made me feel, and how its bittersweet storyline hung weighty Christmas ornaments on my heart strings and tugged them to the ground.
Always Remember, as I'll call it for the sake of brevity, is not your typical Christmas fare, but it is set during the holiday period and the story does culminate on Christmas day. The film is also tender and sweet, and as gooey as a fresh-baked Cinnabon, so yeah, I guess there's no way of denying it - Always Remember I Love You is a Christmas movie.
The main character in Always Remember is Robert, a sixteen year-old boy played by Stephen Dorff, who learns that his wealthy jet-setter parents actually adopted him. More tragically, Robert's Manhattanite parents, portrayed with perfect TV-movie panache by David Birney and Joan Van Ark, discover that their adopted son was kidnapped from his real family when he was a baby. Upon being assailed with this avalanche of identity-shattering news, Robert does what any of us would do; he runs away to middle America to find his birth parents.
