Memento (2000)

Memento: 2000, dir. Christopher Nolan. Seen on DVD (April 21).
It’s been about a month since I saw Memento and I am truly sorry I hadn’t written about the movie earlier. I couldn’t write about it immediately after seeing it because it was intense and I wanted to think a little about what I’d seen. Now I’ve maybe waited too long.

I like Memento. I can see why other people like it. It plays with time … time moves forward within a scene, but the scenes are in backwards order. And that’s the color scenes. The black-and-white scenes, which are interspersed with the color scenes, take place right before the last color scene, which is the pivotal sequence of the movie.
If that doesn’t make sense, go see Memento and you’ll figure it out (and skip the rest of the review so you won’t find out what happens). It is well worth seeing.
Memento is one movie that benefits from DVD because when the movie ends, you can start it up again and watch the first 10 or 15 minutes. That’s what I did, anyway, because I wanted to double-check some stuff. I wanted to see that first scene again.
The movie is wonderfully suspenseful. At first I thought, oh no, it’s yet another one of those movies that starts with the murder of a main character and then backs up from there. That’s been very popular since The Usual Suspects. But I like the way the movie messes with time, in order to give you some understanding of the main character’s short-term memory loss, and yet still fits in with the traditional narrative structure of a feature film.
I am writing this review in a disjointed way, but I have decided that I must be doing this on purpose in order to replicate the elegant disjointed scene structure in Memento. Not because I can’t remember stuff and I’m just typing whatever I can recall in no particular order. And even so, that all ties in with the plot, right?
The movie appears to be about Guy Pearce’s character Leonard Shelby, who suffered short-term memory loss after his wife was murdered, and his obsessive drive to track down and kill his wife’s murderer. The story is told back-to-front, so it begins with Leonard shooting someone whom we gradually learn he believes is his wife’s murderer.
And by the end of the movie, we find out that not only was Teddy not the murderer, but an ethically shady cop who has realized that Leonard just keeps killing and killing murder suspects, then forgetting about them, because all he has left is his desire for revenge.
Leonard is supposed to be able to remember only events leading up to his wife’s death and his subsequent brain damage, but it turns out his wife didn’t die then … he killed her, in a story he remembers as belonging to a client of his. And yet you get the impression he does remember some of the details of his wife’s actual death, but he chooses to forget them. His constant tale of how his short-term memory works is faulty.
Guy Pearce is perfect in the lead, although he reminds me eerily of a cross between Brad Pitt and Val Kilmer. In fact, parts of this movie reminded me of an obscure Val Kilmer movie, The Salton Sea, which would probably make a great double-feature with Memento. Better yet, a triple-feature starting with Bound. What a fun evening that would be, if you survived.
Also, the casting of Joe Pantaliano is inspired, especially if you see Bound before you watch this movie. Very sneaky. Very good.
I would like to see this movie again because I know there are some details I missed. Near the end of the movie, there’s a brief flash of a shot of him in bed with his wife, with entirely different tattoos on his body, and I didn’t get a close look at them. That was probably the one disadvantage of seeing the movie on DVD and not on a larger screen.
This is a movie that you want to see twice, but you don’t have to see it twice to understand and enjoy it. I don’t like movies that I am told I won’t understand unless I see them more than once. Movies should be made to be entertaining on a single viewing. Memento is, although you do have to pay attention.