Looping Short Term Memory Loss
Puzzle Movie Plot Falls To Pieces
By Cole Smithey
Cleverness and pretentiousness collide in writer/director Christopher Nolan’s souped up neo-noir thriller "Memento."
Based on a short story by Nolan’s brother Jonathan, "Memento" is a crime-revenge story that relies on its one big gimmick: a split-and-cut-reverse structure that will have you checking your pockets for your house keys after you leave the theater.
Time moves backward in chunks for Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). He's an woefully bothered ex insurance fraud investigator with a bloodlust for the man who raped and murdered his wife.
Leonard must constantly refresh his ever collapsing memory. Leonard’s biggest problem is that his wife’s killer knocked him on the head during the episode, giving Leonard the memory span of a flea. Leonard makes notes to himself, gets reminder instructions tattooed all over his body, and takes endless Polaroid photos, all in an effort at keeping his memory together long enough to track down and kill a man with the initials J.G.
Leonard’s one-minute amnesia loops rewind in reverse order after Leonard murders a guy (who may or may not be his wife’s killer) in the film’s opening scene. As the story backs up and replays all over itself, Leonard makes a lot of one-sided phone calls to a non-disclosed cop feeding him unreliable information. You will likely get an urge to make some calls of your own.
Christopher Nolan recently won the coveted Waldo Salt screenwriting award for "Memento." I personally have always considered screenplay awards to be a suspect device for a handful of wanna-be screenwriters to beat their chest about some script they wished they’d written.
"Memento" is a movie that beats its own chest before an audience ever gets to it. Every ten seconds of the film reminds you that your life is ticking away while you’re watching it. When Leonard repeatedly warns people not to take it personally if he doesn’t remember who they are from one minute to another, it just reminds us that the scriptwriter is busy monkeying around with logic and narrative form to hold our attention.
The trope wears out its welcome. Nolan spoon feeds plot information in forward retrograde. Things like character motivation audience empathy dissolve rather than emerge. It’s like watching a glass of water repeatedly evaporate and refill itself. Each time it refills, there’s less fluid than it started with.
Guy Pearce saturates his performance with an appropriately masochistic kind of self-examination that you might imagine a person with his character’s memory loss condition would develop. He’s the only thing keeping the movie afloat because you sense his urgency as an actor.
You want the story to pay off for his sake as an actor, but not for the doomed character he represents. That’s why its all the more contemptuous when the story’s ending fails to fulfill its promise of giving a closure to Leonard’s repeating plight.
Leonard’s condition screams out for people to take advantage of him. He lives in a dodgy Los Angeles motel where the owner cheats him by moving Leonard to a cheaper room while charging him more because he knows the poor guy can’t remember which room he usually locks his keys inside. When bartender Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) spits in his beer to see if Leonard will remember it a minute later, the waitress isn’t just playing a dirty trick on Leonard, she’s rubbing the audience’s nose in Leonard's character flaw.
Because Leonard stays constantly pumped up to kill the guy who raped and killed his wife, he makes for a perfect patsy of a hit man. Nolan flirts around this sub-plot possibility with the Natalie character cooking up her own vengeful murder scheme for Leonard to carry out. But most of the grist for Leonard’s predicament comes from Teddy, (a sleazy undercover cop played by Joe Pantoliano).
Neither Natalie or Teddy are fleshed out enough to give anything more than passing reference points to the puzzle movie’s tangled plot. Teddy is presumably the detective on the other end of the line for incessant phone calls, which Leonard repeatedly asks the motel clerk not to send through. If this seems confusing and frustrating that’s because it is. "Memento" is a shifting maze of plot sequences that momentarily make sense before reverting to a kind of visual white noise long before the movie hits the halfway mark.
Leonard drives a sleek new Jaguar that seems appropriate for his slight muscular build, but it begs a question of how he ever remembers where the notoriously unreliable car broke down last, or which auto shop he left it in for repairs. Like so many unanswered questions in this story, there’s no way to tell.
Rated R. 113 mins. 
ZERO STARS
