The Frazzling, Twisting Memento

By this stage in commercial cinema's development, audiences have seen every story and every situation before; a lifetime of watching movies and tv shows has made them restless, impatient, eager to be surprised. By withholding key pieces of information, or rearranging the story so that the meaning of certain scenes is revised as the film goes on, a director can make old stories new again.

Laid end to end, Memento's self-contained scenes amount to little more than a sun-drenched revenge noir with a twist ending. But the way the director tells the story, everything becomes important: each moment, each closeup, each line of dialogue, each emotion felt by Leonard is etched in bold relief. Like certain films by Steven Soderbergh (The Limey, Out of Sight) and Quentin Tarantino (especially Reservoir Dogs)?and older films by Stanley Kubrick, Nicolas Roeg, Alain Resnais and others?Memento suggests that the future of commercial movies can be found in the editing room. Why more filmmakers haven't figured this out mystifies me.

And while you watch Memento, things are definitely happening to your mind and emotions. You're exercising parts of your moviegoing brain you haven't for a while, or had forgotten you had. It's like being forced to write a letter with your left hand when you're right-handed, or to see the world through one eye when injury or infection has closed the other. You can get along all right, but it takes a while to get used to a different way of perceiving the world; you must learn to absorb information and communicate your needs in a new way.

Watching Memento is a frazzling experience?pleasurably so. You'll probably be able to hear a pin drop in the audience because, more than any other commercial film in recent memory, it demands full concentration. You can't talk to your friends or get up for popcorn because you might miss something, and if you miss something?anything?you won't know where you are. The film's structure could be seen as a literalization of an old filmmaker's cliche: What's really important is not the story, but how it's told. And by extension, what's really important isn't what's happening onscreen, but what the film is doing to the viewer's mind and emotions.

More oblique and suggestive are the messages on the hero's Polaroids. We know they're going to mislead the poor schnook because we can clearly see that the messages scrawled on the white portions have been taped over or scratched out, indicating revision. In the film's back-to-front storytelling scheme, the messages on the Polaroids shown in closeup at the start of the movie are really messages scrawled closer to the end of Leonard's story. There were other messages there at one time, yet Leonard obliterated them. Did he decide to obliterate them after thinking really hard, or was he convinced to obliterate them by another character?someone with an agenda, someone who knows how to take advantage of his condition? (It would be so easy to take advantage of Leonard, that you could do it and not even feel guilty about it. It'd be like faking out a dog during a game of fetch.)

Some of the film's repeated elements are straightforward. For instance, each time Leonard meets someone, he is compelled to explain his peculiar condition. He explains his condition to everyone he meets because he can't be entirely sure if they already know about it; he can't be sure if they know about it already because he has no way of knowing if he's ever met them prior to this moment.

Memento is built around an amusing reversal of convention: where the typical film noir hero is a talkative wiseacre who thinks he knows more than he does, Leonard is a quiet cipher who knows he understands very little and is desperate to learn more. As a result, the film is chock-full of repeated phrases, gestures and lines of dialogue that serve both as clues for Leonard and breadcrumbs that tell us where we really are in Memento's highly unconventional narrative.

"I use routine to make my life possible," he tells anyone who will listen. But Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a beautiful bartender with a mysterious bruise on her face, sees the flaw in his system. "You mix your grocery list with your laundry list," she says, "and you'll end up eating your underwear for breakfast." Indeed, the brooding hero's helplessness is his most endearing feature. He can't be sure if the suit he's wearing belongs to him, if the Jaguar he's driving belongs to him, if the notes he makes really mean what he believes they mean. And he can't know for sure if he can trust anyone in his life: people who act like friends might be enemies, and people who seem like incidental characters might be his rescue or his downfall. His uncertainty bathes the whole movie in existential crisis. In Leonard's universe, the friendly cop who repeatedly appears in his life (Joe Pantoliano) could be a criminal in disguise, perhaps the criminal. The rumpled desk clerk at Leonard's seedy motel (a small, lovingly detailed performance by Mark Boone Junior) could be the guy who lets him into his room when he forgets his keys, or a coconspirator waiting for just the right moment to strike.

To orient us, Memento employs a black-and-white framing device that's doled out in little bits throughout the movie's running time. It's set in a seedy motel room where Leonard holes up and ponders the evidence he's collected to figure out whether the people trying to help him are friends or foes, and whether their advice to him is heartfelt and helpful or selfish and destructive. He pores over photographs, maps, scrawled messages on scraps of paper and the countless tattoos that crisscross and obscure large portions of his body. (With his shirt off, the tall, lean, sad-eyed Leonard could be the decent but damaged kid brother of Max Cady in Scorsese's Cape Fear.) In his civilian life as an insurance investigator, Leonard pieced together the arcs of human lives by examining physical evidence, verbal anecdotes and piles of seemingly disconnected paperwork; in the framing device, he's doing the same thing, only the mysterious life being investigated is his own.

He has taken the old tradition of writing important information on one's hand to a surreal and perverse new level. He writes all over his body, and information that he decides is crucial?i.e., clues he believes will help him track down and kill the man who raped and murdered his wife?are made permanent in the form of tattoos.

So Leonard looks and listens and looks and listens, praying that he'll retain some impression of whatever's happening at that instant. To help himself survive, he carries a Polaroid camera with him, snaps pictures of people and places that make impressions on him, then scrawls messages across the photos like, "Don't believe him," and "She has lost someone." (I'm paraphrasing.)

The hero gets the worst of it because his perceptions are massively, comically crippled, putting him at an even greater disadvantage than the typical film noir hero. He has a rare (and, according to the filmmakers, real) mental deficiency: he has no short-term memory. Years ago, he suffered a blow to the head after struggling with an intruder in his home who was in the process of raping and murdering his beautiful young wife (Jorja Fox). As Leonard explains repeatedly throughout Memento, he retains all his memories from before the attack, but he cannot make new memories. Whatever happens to him in the here and now is doomed to evaporate from his mind in minutes. Every waking moment is a race against time and memory. The poor guy wants to move his own story forward, toward revenge against the beast who robbed him of his soulmate. But deep down, he's terrified he's running in place.

Memento was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, a young British filmmaker who is fascinated by the idea of telling familiar stories in fresh ways. (The source was a short story by his brother, Jonathan.) His first film, Following, was shot from a linear script, but assembled in the editing room so that the beginning, middle and end of the script unfolded along parallel tracks, one piece of each section at a time: one, two, three; one, two three. Memento goes even further with editing, taking its structure from Harold Pinter's backwards play Betrayal (which Seinfeld memorably parodied); in terms of atmosphere and characterization, it's very much a scuzzball film noir, with desperate fringe characters screwing each other literally and figuratively to grab a tiny slice of ill-gotten pie. Of course the hero, wandering insurance investigator Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), gets the worst of it.

The scrambled-up film noir Memento points the way toward the rejuvenation of commercial movies. It proves that audiences needn't be babied to enjoy themselves?that it's okay to confuse them, to raise questions that will only be answered at the end, as long as the payoff is satisfying or surprising, preferably both. It's best appreciated not while you're watching it, but while you're thinking back on it later?reading back over its self-contained scenes in your mind, in much the same way that you should now read over the individual paragraphs of this review a second time, in reverse order.