Memento
****
Memento
****
Directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Guy Pearce (L.A.Confidential),
Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix), and Joe Pantoliano (The Matrix)
*Warning: Before viewing this movie, be sure to have plenty of aspirin on hand because it WILL make you think until your head hurts!*
As the opening credits run, we see a man looking at a Polaroid photo as the image of a bloody corpse slowly fades to black, development in reverse. The man is Lenny, a mysterious character who has a disorder of the short-term memory. He cannot make new memories, and blanks out every few minutes, so he relies on notes and photographs to follow his quest to avenge his wife’s murder. In the first few minutes of the movie, he is leading a man he has never met before (but who claims to be his friend) into a warehouse, where he shoots him. His reason: he carries in his hand a Polaroid of the man with the caption, “DO NOT BELIEVE HIS LIES, HE IS THE ONE,” (the man who raped and killed his wife). Confident in his note-taking system, he doesn’t wait to hear the man’s protestations and claims of innocence.
The film plays scene by scene backwards in time, starting at the end and leapfrogging back, until we finally reach the beginning of the story. This is certainly a daunting vision, but director Christopher Nolan brings out the story with a masterful touch. We are drawn into the twists and turns of the plot, and manipulated along with the character of Lenny.
We’ve seen this done before, in the “backwards episode” of Seinfeld, but here it is more than a gimmick of delivering punch line before joke. Here it envelops us in the mind and senses of a man adrift in the passage of time. He has no recollection of past events, and to us each scene seems equally strange and alien.
In another scene, he follows instructions he had written to himself to meet a woman named Natalie at a diner. He walks right past her, and she is visibly hurt that he does not recognize her. But how should he know her? We certainly do not know, any more than Lenny himself knows. The character of Natalie is very interesting, played by Carrie-Anne Moss. She is helping Lenny in his search for the killer, partly because she pities him, but also because, she says, he has helped her in the past. But as the movie progresses into the past, her motivations become much more complex, and her actions take on a completely new significance.
This is an amazing movie, and I recommend it to anyone who can appreciate a new and unique way of telling a story. There is something haunting about how it makes you understand what it is like to see the world through Lenny’s eyes, and that really stays with you long after. There’s plenty of excitement too - fights, chases, and paranoia to spare. I can’t wait until it comes out on video.