Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Memento

Movie Guru Rating:
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

Comment
on this review

In Memento, everything is out of order

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

In the opening scene of Memento, we see: a Polaroid image of a dead man bleeding from the head; the image fading back to white; the film going back into the camera; the body of the dead man jolting upright from the floor; a bullet flying back out of his head into a gun; a finger unreleasing a trigger.

And that's just the beginning. Or the ending. Or something like that.

Memento is a gimmicky movie, but it's a great gimmick, and there are a bunch of ideas swimming around in it—the subjectivity of narration, the ways we construct reality, what the existentialists called the "phenomenology of perception." Of course, you don't have much time to think about all that while you're watching the movie. You're too busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan (whose only previous film was the indie thriller Following), from a story idea suggested by his brother Jonathan, Memento is equal parts smart and smart-ass, which means some people will find it great fun and others will just get annoyed. I'm in the first camp, but I have sympathy for the second.

From that first scene, the entire plot scrolls backward—not quite as literally as the bullet going back into the gun, but with each scene ending where the one before it started. And to make things even more dizzy, the protagonist, Leonard Shelby, has no short-term memory. People, places and things appear and reappear, sometimes with different names and different stories, and he can't remember who or what they are.

Leonard (played with grim assurance by Australian actor Guy Pearce, last seen hitting on Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential) has one advantage: he knows his weakness. He knows he can't remember things, so he writes the important stuff down—sometimes on note paper, sometimes on the back of Polaroids, and most dramatically in tattoos that cover his body. As we reel backward from the violent act at the beginning, in which Leonard calmly executes a man named Teddy, we start to piece together his story. He's a former insurance salesman who is seeking revenge for the rape and murder of his wife. His memory loss dates from a traumatic head injury; he can remember everything before it (an apparently idyllic middle-class life), but nothing afterward. He wakes up every day a blank slate, always obsessed with finding his wife's killer.

Actually, I forgot something (this movie does that to you): there's another narrative thread, shot in black and white so you can keep them separate, that pops up periodically and consists mostly of Leonard talking on the telephone to an unidentified person. He's telling the story of another man with memory loss, a case Leonard handled when he was working insurance. That storyline inches forward and, inevitably, meets the main plot as it careens backward. Got it?

The ramifications of Leonard's situation, combined with the film's structure, lead to constant surprises. Things that seem one way in one scene seem completely different in the next, and then different again a few minutes later. Like Leonard himself, you're never sure who the good guys or bad guys are. Teddy, for example (perfectly played by Joe Pantoliano, who seems alternately candid and cagey)—is he the longtime friend of Leonard's he claims to be? If so, why does the movie begin with his murder? And what about Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss)? Is she, as Leonard's notes to himself indicate, someone who will help him, or someone with secrets of her own? And where did she get that black eye?

It's all very neo-noir, played out against a sun-bleached Burbank backdrop of cheap motels, greasy restaurants and abandoned warehouses. Nolan has a suitable taste for the seedy and disheveled, and the film could as easily take place in 1945 as 2000.

It's not the first movie to play with our sense of reality—from Rashomon up through The Usual Suspects, plenty of films have skewered the idea of objective narration. But it's possible no one has ever done it as thoroughly, on so many levels at once. There are some structural inconsistencies, of course—what exactly Leonard can and can't remember is a little vague, and the duration of his memory varies from a few minutes to entire days. But those details get swept along with everything else in Nolan's effortless backward flow.

By the time the film ended, cleverly coming full circle to its beginning, I admit I still wasn't entirely sure of everything that had happened. There are twists on twists on twists, and some of them are dependent on how much you believe provably unreliable sources. Repeated viewing is almost essential, which would be obnoxious if the film as a whole weren't so entertaining.

For all the philosophical questions Memento implies, it's really a fairly light movie, a think piece for the MTV generation. Where Rashomon took an earnest (if heavy-handed) stab at our comprehension of the world, Memento mostly wants to just jolt us out of spoon-fed infotainment complacency. You can't nod out or chat with your neighbor through this one, and that's achievement enough.

One thing I can't help but think: in the near future, digital technology will allow all of us to sequence movie scenes in whatever order we want on our DVDs. If we want to watch the middle, then the end, then the beginning, we will. But making sense of it will still be pretty much up to us. In a way, Memento is a cautionary tale for the age of instant information—we know how it ends before it even begins, yet the knowledge is useless without context.