DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
Christopher
Nolan
STORY BY
Jonathan
Nolan
PRODUCERS
Jennifer Todd
Suzanne Todd
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Wally Pfister
MUSIC
David Julyan
EDITOR
Dody Dorn
CAST
Guy Pearce (Leonard)
Carrie-Anne Moss (Natalie)
Joe Pantoliano (Teddy)
Mark Boone Junior (Burt)
Russ Fega (Waiter)
Jorja Fox (Leonard's Wife)
Stephen Tobolowsky (Sammy)
Harriet Sansom Harris (Mrs. Jankis)
Thomas Lennon (Doctor)
Callum Keith Rennie (Dodd)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 113m
U.S. release: March 16, 2001
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Christopher
Nolan films
reviewed on this website:
- Insomnia
|
As
you may have heard by now, the acclaimed thriller Memento
is the story of a man with no short-term memory, told entirely
backward. The man, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), wants to find
out who raped and murdered his wife; the same "incident"
that made him a widower also gave him head trauma that left him
unable to "form new memories" -- he can remember everything
up to the event, but everything after that eludes his grasp,
to the point where he has turned his whole body into a tattooed
Post-It note of reminders ("John G. raped and murdered my
wife," reads one message written on his chest -- backwards,
so that he can read it in the mirror every time he shaves, which
he also has to remind himself to do).
Would Memento be as effective if told forward instead
of backward? Of course not. The brilliance of Memento
is not in its story but in how it tells the story. When
a scene begins, we are as disoriented as Leonard; sometimes he
ends up talking to someone we haven't seen before, and he doesn't
ever remember meeting, yet they act as if they've known him for
a while. The scene then ends -- please try to stay with me here
-- with the beginning of the previous scene. This
is nowhere near as frustrating for the viewer as it sounds; instead,
it's transfixing and does an ingenious job of putting us inside
Leonard's fractured perception. Sometimes you get so involved
in a scene that you forget you've already seen how it's going
to end.
Writer-director Christopher Nolan, whose first film was a black-and-white
noir (1998's Following) little seen in America,
turns up the volume of the usual noir paranoia to 11:
not only can't you trust anyone, you can't remember why
you can't trust anyone. Yet the film is cool, contemplative,
a puzzle movie in which you see the finished puzzle right up
front and then watch as it disassembles itself. I could tell
you who the killer of Leonard's wife is, or seems to be,
since the movie opens with Leonard getting his revenge, or seeming
to; yet treachery complicates Leonard's mission (as if it weren't
complicated enough), so when we hear a revelation at the end
of the film (the movie's chronological beginning) -- a revelation
that Leonard, at the movie's beginning/story's end, has long
forgotten -- we don't know if it's on the level or not. All I'll
say is that it's been a while since I've seen a twist ending
like this that works on about 17 different levels aside from
turning the plot on its head.
The newly blonde, slightly stubbly Guy Pearce, looking like a
more precisely chiselled Brad Pitt, underplays Leonard throughout;
he's a hero in a daze, often unconsciously funny, as when he
tells the same story over and over, to the bemusement of acquaintances
who've heard it over and over. Given the challenge of embodying
a man who forgets whatever happened ten minutes ago, Pearce has
to begin anew in every scene, a blank slate with vague impressions
of quiet anguish. His best moment here comes when Leonard hires
a prostitute for an experiment baffling to her but, to us, funny
at first and then undeniably saddening.
The only other two major roles in Memento are filled by
Carrie-Anne Moss, as a mysterious bartender named Natalie, and
Joe Pantoliano, as a mysterious figure (criminal? cop?) named
Teddy. The Matrix
connection is probably no coincidence: Leonard is living in a
sort of matrix himself, a shadow world in which everything is
a shadow. Last time I checked, Memento had risen to #44
on the Internet Movie Database's Top 250 Movies list, voted on
by registered users, making it the youngest film in the top 50.
There's a reason for that. The movie will almost surely madden
some and fascinate others (some may feel both ways); if given
a proper push, this could become the most talked-about cinematic
Rubik's Cube since The
Usual Suspects. Yet Christopher Nolan never strikes you
as a hot-shot getting high on his own narrative cleverness. Memento
leaves you with an existential chill. If you see the film, ask
yourself how you feel about Leonard's final decision (or, I should
say, the decision he makes before the end credits): whether it's
understandable, whether it's justifiable, and above all, whether
it really makes any damn difference. |
