Memento
Review by Mark Mordue
Film Review Archive

Crew: Writer/Director: Christopher Nolan. Based on the short story by Jonathan Nolan. Produced by Jennifer Todd & Suzanne Todd. Director of Photography: Wally Pfister. Editor: Dody Dorn. Music: David Julian.
Key Cast: Leonard (Guy Pearce); Natalie (Carrie Anne Moss); Teddy (Joe Pantoliano).

Someone holds a Polaroid. It's dark, forensic. You can just make out the back of a man's head. Blood and hair, body face down, broken glasses on the ground.

A hand keeps shaking the Polaroid dry. Till you notice the image is fading, not developing. It turns sepia, then disappears. Gets sucked back into a camera with a whir and a flash, while a gun rises from the ground as if by levitation, then BOOM, everything speeds up violently: gore reassembles itself into a man half begging for mercy, half threatening to snake away. You already know he ain't gonna make it. "No."

This is murder in reverse.

Memento opens with this stunningly cool piece of rewind, and keeps on running as a narrative and cinematic puzzle for the next two hours. Masterminded by the 30-year-old English director Christopher Nolan, it deservedly won him a best scriptwriting award at the Sundance Film Festival 2001. It must have given Nolan quite some brain ache too, making sure every step backwards in the story, every kaleidoscopic fracture, was perfectly in place.

Reviewing Memento certainly presents a challenge. After all, it's not the ending I can't tell you about - it's the beginning. Or what would normally have been the beginning, the standard set-up that this unusual film slip-slides back towards. Maybe this is the director's revenge on critics who sell out a story line for the sake of easy commentary. But I've got narrative gridlock on my mind, and it's hard to break out and tell you exactly what I mean to say about this jigsaw of a picture without spoiling the spirit of dislocation that makes it so marvelous.

It's ironic that Nolan smashes the idea of conventional narrative in order to assert the vitality of story telling and the sanctity of the unexpected for an audience. A low budget filmmaker, Nolan plays close, one might even say surreptitious, attention to detail, plot and character. As Hollywood cinema becomes more ecstatic on the surface, more sensational and less provocative (there is a difference), he is proof yet again that classical discipline - despite radical style or content - is coming from the fringes.

Following, Nolan's first feature at a trim 70 minutes, told the story of a writer seeking inspiration by arbitrarily following people around London. He eventually becomes entangled with a burglar who takes him out on a break-in. At the time Nolan told The Guardian (5.11.99), "There's an abstraction in cheap films. You can't get the big establishing shots, you can't place things in a conventional way, you can't flood the place with extras. You have to work within that, try to turn that to your advantage.."

In Memento he once again shows a fascination with storytelling tropes and this 'abstraction' of the medium itself, using flashbacks, cutting up sequences, beginning them mid-pulse and repeating them again from another angle, or slowly letting them change meaning as we retreat from their apparent climax.

Guy Pearce plays the killer and the photographer in the first scene. We find out that his name is Leonard Shelby. A former insurance investigator, he's suffering a rare form of brain damage called anterograde memory loss, brought on by a blow to the head. Shelby received the injury during a break-in that culminated in the death of his wife. Ever since, he's been hell bent on avenging her death and tracking down the killer.

But how does a man without a functioning memory investigate an unsolved murder, let alone remember where he is living, who his friends are, even where he is going? As he tells a droogy hotel clerk (played with sly wit by Mark Boone Junior) where he is staying, "Since my injury I can't make new memories. Everything fades. If we talk for too long, I'll forget how we started."

Nolan puts us in Leonard's headspace. And keeps our brain stuttering while we try to piece the facts together, to make some sense of his world gone wrong. 

We follow Leonard as he takes photos, writes notes, makes  diagrams to stay on track, forever loses his room keys (Memento is not all black vertigo - the film also shares a few jokes with us). If it's something really important, Leonard tattoos the details onto himself. Violent possibilities literally line his body. And down his arm: "The Facts. Fact 1: Male. Fact 2: White. Fact 3: First name John or James. Fact 4: Last name: G____."

Supposedly helping him is Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), a mustached slime bag with a sneaky sense of humour and all the empathy of a mollusk. What does this guy really want? Leonard's other ally is a battered barmaid called Natalie (Carrie-Ann Moss direct from The Matrix). Her split-lipped sexuality mixes spite with a kindness that comes "out of pity," qualities somewhere between a hiss and a tear. You could say Teddy and Natalie are the angel and the devil on Leonard's shoulders. Who to trust?

Both Pantoliano and Moss bring an extraordinary ambiguity to their roles. Indeed they almost steal the film with their suggestive villainy, partly because Leonard is such a blank slate, a nowhere man.

That's not to belittle Guy Pearce's knockout performance, a tour de force return to our attention since he was last noticed in L.A. Confidential. Watch the way he pushes open a door when he should pull at it as he enters his hotel, just to see how Pearce works the little things as an actor - reminding you in that small, undoubtedly improvised jerk of Leonard's constant forgetfulness, his strange and even comic vulnerability. Let alone his reveries for a dead wife and the domestic totems that haunt him into a bizarre and tragic tryst with a hooker. As an actor, he makes each moment ache.

"She's gone," he says, "and the present is trivia that I scribble down in fucking notes." You know right then and there that this is a deeply troubled man, not a shell looking for a life to call his own. 

Pearce stalks this film with a lost dynamism, all a-sweat in a pale blue suit as he careens around the strip malls, motels and warehouses of Burbank, a slice of drive-by America sinking slowly into the summer concrete. Wally Pfister's cinematography echoes Robbie Muller's (Paris, Texas) skilled use of anonymous, exhausting daylight and stays close to the real, with the gritty coloration of independent American filmmaking at its 1970s peak. The setting and the filming style gives Memento a necessarily mundane poetry, making the bizarre premise somehow more acceptable.

Memento's repetitious narrative riffs may stretch a few people's patience, something I noticed more on a second viewing. But it's hard not to be impressed. Nolan is already being touted as a saviour of U.K. cinema (even if America is now his base). He has been compared to the likes Nicholas Roeg, Lindsay Anderson, Christopher Petit and Iain Sinclair in the English media.  One can meanwhile hear the sigh of relief globally: he hasn't made another Brit flick about gangsters or youth culture. Wow.

Leonard's central question - beyond who even who murdered his wife - is really in the nature of who - or what - he is? "How can I heal?" he asks near the end. "How am I supposed to heal if I can't feel time?"

The director plays brilliantly with that lost sense of time. And fires all kinds of questions at us in the audience. Who are we? What drives and defines us as individuals? More frighteningly, "Do I lie to myself to be happy?"

What evolves is a detective story, a piece of existential noir where the nature of the 'self' is put under question. I hesitated about the depth of this in Memento, wondered if I was just being dazzled by the director flipping the film gauge back and forth, playing those mind games forever. But I left the film surprisingly affected. 

Together with Dody Dorn's superb editing, Christopher Nolan has made us all a celluloid rubrics cube: watch it spin and be amazed.

MARK MORDUE