Country: United States
Genre: Drama/ Suspense
Director: Christopher Nolan
Year: 2000
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
It might be tempting to dismiss Memento’s reverse chronological storytelling strategy as a gimmick, until you realize that it’s the best possible way to tell the story of a person who cannot form short term memories. In the beginning of the film, we’re just as much in the dark as the hero.
When we first meet Leonard (Guy Pearce), he has just shot and killed Teddy (Joe Pantoliano). This is the only scene in the film which literally runs backward. We watch as a Polaroid that Leonard took of the corpse progressively fades to white, a metaphor for Leonard’s constantly fading short term memories.
Leonard is convinced that he has just killed the man who murdered his wife and left him brain damaged. The rest of the film follows the tortured path that led Leonard to this moment.
Has Leonard killed the right man or not? Teddy presents himself as Leonard’s friend, a cop who’s helping him find his wife’s killer. If that isn’t true, did Teddy himself kill Leonard’s wife, or is he simply taking advantage of Leonard in some way? It sure would be easy to. You could ask Leonard if he’d lend you 20 bucks every five minutes, and he would never be the wiser.
The other main character with shadowy motives is Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a bartender who may have a drug dealing boyfriend. Or not.
Memento succeeds fabulously both as a film noir mystery and as a metaphysical meditation on reality. You see, everyone constructs their reality from memories which are unreliable, and from opinions from other people that you can’t really trust 100%. For example, people tend to hang out with others who agree with them on politics and have similar cultural attitudes. Who’s to say that these people aren’t mutually delusional? Leonard simply represents a more extreme case of the human condition.
Director Christopher Nolan’s craftmanship is incredibly assured in his 2nd feature. Memento may be low budget, but not so you’d notice. The camera work is fluid, the pace is crackling, the performances are all on point (a special mention is merited for a comic and moving performance by the great character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, as another man afflicted with the inability to form short term memories), and the locations are perfect for the story. The script manages to be both concise and absolutely clear, which is a marvel considering the challenge of telling the story in reverse chronological order.
I was expecting great things of Christopher Nolan based on Memento, but oddly enough, it took Nolan five more tries to equal his accomplishment with the even more ambitious and complex The Dark Knight, which took filmic comic book adaptation into the realm of art.
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