Memento

Synopsis: Former insurance claims assessor Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is searching for his wife's rapist and killer. Although able to recall details of his life before his wife's death, Leonard is unable to remember anything since then for longer than a few minutes. Living in a rundown motel, he uses a detailed system of notes, Polaroid photographs (and remarkably stylish tattoos) to keep track of the leads he has established. Avenging his wife, he believes, will give him back his life. Or perhaps his life is nothing more than the pursuit of a revenge that he will be unable to remember.

Imagine having to write notes to yourself to remind yourself what you were doing or thinking fifteen minutes earlier. You'd end up spending so much time reading and cross-referencing notes that you'd probably not do very much at all. Christopher Nolan's film is a bit like that. Three steps back, two-and-a-half steps forward. And where do you finish up? Back where you started from. Or something like that.

It would be interesting to read the original story (by the director's younger brother, Jonathan Nolan). If it has been by David Mamet it would have taken the film's intriguing premise and interwoven plot twist into plot twist leaving us with, if not closure, then a sense of structure and an enigma within it (compare for, instance Mamet's Heist released the same year). Nolan's film on the other hand leaves us with a lot of pieces but no real sense of how they intrinsically relate to each other. The implication is that if we wind back far enough in time we will find the answer to our questions but this could be as much symptomatic of an obfuscating plot as a sophisticated mystery. Unquestionably, Memento aspires to being the latter. Perhaps the pieces do add up (one would need to review them in some detail), but like any puzzle, a lot of what is going on feels like killing time.

Pearce's Leonard (surprisingly well-muscled for a supposedly-average-Joe claims assessor and why has he gone to the trouble of extensively tattooing himself with reminders of his mission) pursues his quarry with the detached doggedness appropriate to his career as an investigator, but more self-deprecatingly preoccupied than pathologically obsessive. Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), his dubious sometimes associate, is sleazy, yet surprisingly articulate and cheerily good-natured for his part (M. Emmett Walsh would have been perfect). Or even, if he really is a pretty good guy, what is he doing devoting his life to helping Leonard? Carrie-Ann Moss's Natalie is your standard bar-tending chick and brings nothing of interest to her role. Indeed all the characters, in a film with no real dramatic sinew, have a serviceable featurelessness to them whilst Nolan's direction is similarly so even-handed, so mildly descriptive of the story that keeping abreast of the cut-up, re-iterative narrative becomes really the only element of interest. Sure there's an attempt to be tough with some dirty talk and some generic gun-play but, as with much of this film it's not very convincing.

Memento does touch on some interesting questions about memory, identity and the assumptions we all make in our everyday lives and the plotting (and editing) is clearly the result of careful consideration.but whether it really hangs together behind its gimmicky backward-forward chronology (as did another film dealing with memory, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless MInd, 2004) is another matter. I doubt it very much but nevertheless the film was an enormous critical and considerable box office success and kick-started the Nolans' film-making careers.

FYI: Steven Tobolowsky who plays Jankis here played an insurance salesman in Harold Ramis's time-bending Groundhog Day (1993)

 

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