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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Not everyone may wish to go quite as far as I have -- four theatrical viewings, three of them with copious note taking; a fifth viewing on videotape, with lots of whipping back and forth to check for differences in "repeated" shots, and slo-mo attention to quick-cut subliminal moments; reading the published script and comparing it to the film; reading the short story, "Memento Mori," written by Nolan's brother Jonathan and credited as the film's source; and a few trips through www.otnemem.com, the film's official Web site, also by Jonathan Nolan. More than anything, I'm grateful to everyone who posted ideas about "Memento" in the movie conference of the Well -- you know, "America's pioneering online community, see www.well.com" -- a whole gang of enthusiastic, contentious, brilliant, pigheaded and articulate fans, who have more than once opened up for me some movie that I simply did not get.
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As I mentioned above, asserting that "Memento" is a tale told backward is actually superficial -- even misleading. Nolan has in fact done something more complicated and way more clever than that. The shocking opening credit sequence, in which Leonard kills a corrupt cop named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano, the ubiquitous master of sleazebag characters, who played Ralphie on "The Sopranos" this year), is the only scene that literally runs backward: In it, we see a Polaroid photo undevelop, a bullet fly back up the barrel of a gun and Teddy come back to life briefly "after" the sound of the shot.
This scene, which is in color, is immediately followed by a black-and-white bit in which we see Leonard, in an anonymous motel room, explaining a little about his circumstances in voice-over. The next extended scene, back to color, finds Leonard meeting Teddy at his motel and then traveling to an abandoned building, whereupon we see Leonard shoot Teddy again. (This time it's even more disturbing.)
The movie then proceeds, alternating black-and-white and color sequences. The main narrative of the story is the backward, color one. We stumble back in increments, and meet "new" characters -- Teddy; a classic noir moll, Natalie; her boyfriend Jimmy; and a drug dealer named Dodd -- each scene stepping back to put the previous one a bit better in context and providing a lot of shocks, jokes and horrors along the way. And in between each we see Leonard back in his hotel room, in black and white, talking on the phone and telling an oddly parallel story.
Here's what we figure out as we go: Leonard Shelby (Pearce) is a former insurance investigator. In his previous life, intruders rape and kill his wife one night. He kills one of them, but the other bonks him on the head and gets away. The injury leaves him suffering from a condition called anterograde amnesia, which means that he can't create new long-term memories. Leonard can remember everything prior to the accident, since his old long-term memories are still intact; but his current attention span lasts roughly 15 minutes (and even less when he's stressed or distracted), and in no case can any of these current memories be permanently implanted in his brain.
Since he can't experience the passage of time, his wife's death is always fresh to him; and so he is passionately determined to find the remaining intruder and kill him. He reminds himself of what he's doing through a series of notes, a pocketful of Polaroid snapshots with helpful information written on them and (for really important stuff) tattoos. We see that he's developed a number of clues to the killer's identity, each of these burned onto his body. The killer's name is John or James and his last name begins with a "G." He's a drug dealer; Leonard even has the killer's license-plate number. As the movie lurches backward, we see how and where he gleans each piece of the puzzle.
At the same time, the black-and-white scenes, which run in forward order, find Leonard in his hotel room talking on the phone. In these sequences, Leonard tells that parallel tale, illustrated for us with visual "flashbacks." As an insurance investigator, Leonard had a curious case: a man, Sammy Jankis, who had an accident and wound up with, yes, anterograde amnesia. Leonard investigates and ruthlessly denies the man's medical claim on the grounds that it was a mental problem and not a physical one.
But Sammy's wife can't deal with the condition: She doesn't quite understand Leonard's ruling and think it means Sammy is in a sense faking. She suffers from diabetes, and it's Sammy's job to deliver her insulin shots. So taking advantage of Sammy's memory problem, and knowing that her husband loves her and wouldn't do anything to hurt her, she asks him to give her three or four insulin shots in quick succession. In doing so, she has the satisfaction, as she sinks into an irreparable coma, of proving to herself that his condition must be real.
