Memento

by Sam Adams

recommended

With its tricky, twisty structure and glossy, noir photography (by Wally Pfister), Memento is every bit the year’s answer to The Usual Suspects, an art film for people who’d rather be entertained by mechanics than stumped with philosophical posers. Make no mistake: writer/director Christopher Nolan (whose debut was the little-seen Following) has a dazzling command of structural pyrotechnics. Told from the point of view of a man with no short-term memory, Memento runs simultaneously backwards and forwards: While snippets of film work backwards from the shooting which opens the film, each domino rising into place like time-lapse photography in reverse, black and white segments interspersed with those snippets start further back in time and work forwards. In essence, we start at both the beginning and the end, and work toward the middle.

Based on a short story by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, Memento hangs on the hoariest of hard-boiled premises, albeit with one massive catch. Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is a man obsessed with tracking down his wife’s killer; the police, as it usually goes, are convinced they’ve already gotten their man, and that Leonard’s crazy to boot. The catch is that he really is crazy, or at least unable to see the world in a normal fashion. Sapped in the head by his wife’s killer, Leonard has been robbed of his short-term memory — indeed the ability to form any memories at all. (This is, not that it matters, a real medical condition.) While he remembers everything up to and including his wife’s death, from that point onward Leonard’s like a busted stopwatch, endlessly resetting himself to zero. He has devices to help jog — really, rebuild — his memory: notes, annotated Polaroids and tattoos for the really important stuff. But basically what he knows is that a man killed his wife, and Leonard has to return the favor.

At first, Memento isn’t so much a whodunit as a why dunit; since the movie opens with Leonard executing the weaselly Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and we know he’s sworn to kill his wife’s murderer, the question would seem to be how Leonard arrived at his conclusion that Teddy is the "John G." responsible for her death (that name being one of the clues tattooed on Leonard’s body). But the further back in time (and forward into the movie) we go, the less certain we are that Leonard’s killed the right man. For one thing, there’s the cagey barmaid Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), who makes like a fellow crime victim but seems to have more up her sleeve. Then there are the mysteries about Leonard himself: We know who he was up to the accident, but after that point, he’s as cloudy about his own history as anyone else’s. What happens to a man who can’t remember what he’s done? What does he become?

Like a detective story in reverse, Memento takes us away from certainty, not toward it. We start with a simple, even paradigmatic act, the ultimate expression of square-jawed action-movie finality, and the further back we go, the greater our doubts become. The more we understand, the less we know. In a sense, this is simply forensic science as film art, starting from hard facts — a crime scene, even — and working backwards. But it’s obvious that Nolan’s out to unravel the whole fabric of the genre, to quite literally turn the detective movie on its head.

This is, it should be said, great fun, in the sense that a crossword puzzle or Trivial Pursuit is fun. But it shouldn’t be confused with any major reworking of the form. I wrote about Nolan’s Following, which used a similarly intricate structure, that the movie’s flimsiness would be instantly apparent if you simply recut it so as to lay all the bits out in chronological order. I have no doubt Memento would unravel similarly with a bit of creative surgery. Certainly, the film’s structure is part of its point, that memory is fickle, that conclusions, once reached, tend to wipe away the manifold decisions (some informed, some arbitrary) that support them, and that no matter how illusory it might be, we need certainty, a sense of purpose, to survive. But as you’re sitting in the theater trying to fit the pieces together in your head, it starts to occur to you that you’re simply being toyed with, that plot threads are suggested and abandoned, duplicities hinted at and glossed over, a cloud of confusion to cover the movie’s tracks.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with toying with an audience’s mind: It’s a basic element of any thriller, and a perfectly noble and established directorial device. What’s odd is how certain forms of manipulation are seen as acceptable, and others not. Memento has been raved at by many of the same critics who slagged off last year’s What Lies Beneath, yet I can’t for the life of me see any profound difference between the two. Sure, the latter employs more traditional boo-movie techniques, while Memento relies on a deliberately difficult (yet, paradoxically, not particularly challenging) strategy which forces the audience to hang on every minute detail. (The deceptively simple scrawls on Leonard’s Polaroids reveal a particularly complex history.) But why one should be acclaimed as cinematic reinvention, the other denounced as heavy-handed Hollywood machination is a mystery.

Of course, What Lies Beneath buries its subtext deep, so as not to get in the way of its entertainment, while Memento self-congratulatorily brings its themes to the forefront: In handy voiceover, Leonard guides you through the movie’s themes, which are as simple as its story is convoluted. None of this takes away from the fact that Memento is genuinely clever, pleasantly tricky and involving. But when trickery is mistaken for perceptiveness, you lose the far end of the scale.