If I had seen it in high school, I would probably been blown away by the showily clever Memento, this season’s Movie Everyone Says You Should Be Talking About. But while the film puts an entertaining twist on film noir fatalism, along the way it plays nearly as many tricks on its audience as it does on its hapless hero.
Memento begins with its nominal end: a fatal shooting in an abandoned warehouse. The first scene runs literally in reverse-bullets popping into the gun barrel-while subsequent scenes play forwards and are merely sequenced backwards. In other words, each scene ends where the previous one begins. Meanwhile, an intercut series of sequential scenes in blank and white runs forward.
The shooter is Leonard (Guy Pearce), a former insurance investigator turned vigilante detective to find the man who killed his wife. Leonard’s big problem is he is minus one short term memory: He smashed his head trying to save his wife, and while he recalls his preaccident life perfectly, he can not make any new memories. So he writes notes on the backs of Polaroids and beneath his clothes his well toned hide is tatooed laundry list of important facts.
Classic films noir were typically about fate. The deep shadows, claustrophobic settings and sweaty brows told you the (anti)hero couldn’t help falling for the femme fatale, opening that door, picking up that pistol. Memento goes this one better: Leonard truly has no choice because everything’s literally happened already. Moreover, he struggles to keep from becoming an utter pawn. Unless he makes the necessary notations, people can lie to him with impunity. Weasely little Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) might be a good cop, a bad cop or a snitch. Sexy Natalie (Carrie Anne Moss) might be Leonard’s best friend or his worst enemy.
Likewise, as in any thriller, the audience is kept off balance, too, not least because the film is essentially a series of nested flashbacks; the need to continually piece it all together alone commands your interest. And just to keep things heady, writer-director Christopher Nolan adds a layer of existentialism, often with Cartesian overtones. ’’Just because I don’t remember doesn’t make my actions meaningless, ’’ insists Leonard, who concludes that facts like those he inks into his flesh are reliable but ’’memory is treachery.’’
Memento does not achieve its effects without a bit of sleight of hand. Leonard’s memory bank, for instance, supposedly holds only a couple minutes of information, but sometimes he seems to forget things in an instant, and at least once he retains a fact for what’s got to be at least an hour. It’s hard to imagine Nolan doesn’t have some explanation for this discrepancy, but nothing leaps to mind so readily as plot convenience.
In the end, though, it’s the completeness of Nolan’s fatalism more than his dime-store philosophizing that makes Memento so intriguing, and so troubling. Even if Leonard had the chance to make a choice-if the film ran forward-his malfunctioning memory still robs him of the ability to do so. Arranging the scenes in reverse puts the audience in the same bind; we just don’t have enough information to know what is right or wrong and, Nolan implies, we can’t ever. Forwards or backwards, Memento sticks in your brain, but its cosmology is a roadmap to moral idiocy.