Reverse Logic
FILM: Memento (R)
DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan
STARRING: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss
WHERE: Canal Place
GRADE: B+
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What did I do last night? Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) tries to figure out where he is and what he’s doing in Christopher Nolan’s clever thriller Memento.
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An obviously distraught man stands over a body, holding a Polaroid photo he has taken of the slain man. He shakes the picture vigorously, and as if he’s slinging the image from the square of paper, what it shows gradually dissolves and disappears.
Such is the brilliant beginning of writer-director Christopher Nolan’s Memento, a thriller in reverse. The opening sequence in Memento is its story’s end, and it’s actually played backwards. A gun leaps into a man’s hand. A dead man springs back to life and into the frenzied confrontation he will not survive. A photo of homicide un-develops. The reason this works so well as a metaphor for what follows is because we are being launched into a fractured tale that proceeds from the central character’s inability to form memories.
After the opening, the tale is spun through a series of scenes which, thankfully, move forward in time. The picture’s overall narrative continues to move backward, however, as each scene ends where the one before it begins. We’ve seen this device before, like in Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal, which was adapted for the screen in 1983 by director David Jones. And in the end here, however well executed, it is merely a device. Memento holds you tight as long as you’re in the theater, but largely evanesces as you drive home. Lots of foam in the latte, not so much espresso.
The backward marching tale in Memento is the story of one-time insurance claims adjuster Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce looking like he’s been carved out of slate). A pivotal case in Leonard’s career came when he ruled that a sweet-natured man (Stephen Tobolowsky) suffering from profound memory loss did not deserve insurance coverage under the terms of his policy. Then lo and behold, Leonard comes down with the same affliction. Only worse, in a way. Leonard’s wife is raped and murdered, and Leonard suffers a devastating head injury trying to come to her aid. Afterwards, Leonard can remember all the details of his life up to and including his wife’s death. Thus, he’s driven to find her killer. The blow he suffered to the head, however, has left him unable to form and hold new memories. If he engages someone in a conversation that runs for longer than several minutes, he can’t remember how the conversation began.
Needless to say, this constitutes a fairly serious handicap. Leonard compensates by taking Polaroids of anything and anybody he thinks relevant to his investigation and by turning his own body into a living notebook, painstakingly tattooing himself with clues he needs to pursue and conclusions he’s reached.
We, of course, arrive at the end when Leonard executes a chatty and seemingly manipulative man named Teddy Gammell (Joe Pantoliano at his low-life best). So, from the back end get-go, we know who done it. What we don’t know is why. We know Leonard thinks Teddy either directly killed Leonard’s wife or played some active role in her death. But we don’t know the tattooed logic by which he reached that conclusion. That’s what we gradually discover as each preceding scene stacks up one after another.
The structure of this film, coupled with the nature of Leonard’s affliction, delivers moments of unexpected comedy. Teddy drives a ratty 20-year-old car and is always trying to convince Leonard that the late-model sports car Leonard drives actually belongs to Teddy, a strategy Leonard counters by producing a Polaroid of the roadster labeled “My car.” One sequence opens with Leonard running through alleyways and around parked cars, but he’s already forgotten why. Is he chasing someone or being chased, he wonders. Another scene ensues from Leonard’s being served a cold beer by a bartender (Carrie-Anne Moss) wearing a notably odd expression. In the next, prior, scene we learn that the bartender and another customer have openly spit in the beer, then simply waited long enough for Leonard to forget that fact before taking mean delight in watching him drink it.
Not everything here quite comes together, certainly not on a single viewing. We never figure out why Leonard invites a whore to surround herself with his dead wife’s possessions or why afterwards he burns those objects. We understand the confusion that leads to Leonard’s antagonisms with a drug dealer named Dodd (Calumn Keith Rennie), but we haven’t a clue as to how the situation with Dodd is concluded or why. Most of all, of course, we can’t quite sort out how Leonard can remember that he can’t remember when he can’t remember anything else. But we dare not pick at that thread for fear of unraveling the whole.
Still, for the patient and resolutely attentive viewer, Memento works plenty well enough. You don’t see the beginning coming from the end. And the reverse of that is a lot more than you say for most films these days.
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