"Memento"

Backwards told is thriller noir-art empty ultimately but compelling and intriguing this.

By Charles Taylor

Mar 16, 2001 | In the climax of the art-noir "Memento," Guy Pearce, as a man suffering short-term memory loss investigating the murder of his wife, kills Joe Pantoliano, playing his assistant, after coming to believe that Pantoliano is the real killer. Now before you howl that I've given the movie away I should tell you that all I've done is describe the first two or three minutes. The climax, you see, comes at the beginning, and that I can reveal it without having to worry about spoiling anything should give you an idea of just how much emotional involvement you can expect watching it.

Like Harold Pinter's "Betrayal" and Atom Egoyan's "Exotica," Christopher Nolan's "Memento" is told backwards, from end to beginning. There's no denying its cleverness. It's probably the cleverest use yet of that essentially stupid device. I've heard all sorts of arguments for reverse storytelling, the most frequent being that it allows you to watch a scene and the interactions of the characters without any preconceptions.

I don't buy it. There's something basically nonsensical about asking an audience to watch a scene without any of the background information or emotional history that would allow them to respond to what's going on. It might be wonderful for people who like to come in on the middle of movies, and it's a great way of discussing "tropes" and what have you, but as a way of telling a story it's a bust. "Memento" has gotten extraordinary advance reviews, and part of that praise is due no doubt to its being a puzzle movie. From "Last Year in Marienbad" on, puzzle movies have almost always been presumed to be hiding great depths. But by the time "Memento" disappears up its own existence, you might suspect that it's told backwards because telling it forwards would tip us off much sooner that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

For roughly the first hour, though, Nolan almost pulls it off. Since mysteries show us things before we can make sense of them, Nolan's method makes a kind of sense; he sustains our desire to see what happens at a low, steady simmer. His detective is Leonard Shelby (Pearce), a former insurance investigator whose short-term memory has been decimated since finding his wife raped and murdered. He can focus in chunks of about 15 minutes.

After that, no matter how many times he's met someone, it's as if he's meeting them for the first time. To help him remember, he takes Polaroids of people and places, with relevant information jotted down on the back. And he's turned his body into a giant memo pad, with the important clues he's discovered tattooed on his flesh. The catch, of course, is that he relies on any information that he's written down as gospel. He can't process anything he learns later on that might contradict it.

Nolan has structured the film in short bursts that are roughly equal to Leonard's attention span. We watch a scene, and then the next scene (which has actually taken place previous to what we've already seen) annotates what we just saw. The method offers a few genuine shocks, particularly in scenes involving Carrie-Anne Moss as a woman Leonard trusts because she too has lost someone to violence. (The problem is that the shocks involving her character also reduce the role to that noir cliché: the cunning, femme fatale bitch.) But for the most part the plot only gets more confusing as it opens up, and puts us in the position of feeling less and less sympathy for Pearce.

It's easy to spot the movies that Nolan is referencing here: John Boorman's "Point Blank" and Steven Soderbergh's "The Limey," with their fractured narratives and seedy views of Los Angeles. And unless I'm mistaken he's also taken time to study "Groundhog Day" with its constant repetition of scenes, each repetition adding something that advances the story.

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