Right from the beginning, Christopher Nolan has been obsessed with the way that time and narrative can be so easily be manipulated by the magic of cinema and hes been dicking around with it ever since. From the reordered narrative of his debut, Following, past the dueling time frames of Inception and Dunkirk and into the backwards/forwards action of Tenet, the director has twisted more timelines than Kang The Conqueror and altered more perceptions than Derrin Brown – hell, even Batman Begins stirred up its Bruce Wayne origin story with meticulously placed flashbacks.
However, after all these years, Nolan’s best example of scrambling a points of a story around still remains Memento, his magnificently tricksy neo-noir thriller that literally tells its story ass-backwards and somehow makes it more entertaining than as if it was playing out in a more conventional way.
Leonard Shelby is a former insurance investigator who has a very peculiar and precise ailment to build his life around; that of anterograde amnesia. What this means is ever since the incident that saw his wife raped and murdered by two assailants and him suffering severe head trauma, Leonard can’t form new memories from that night on, leaving him in a state of perpetual confusion as his brain resets periodically, often leaving him with no idea what he’s doing or why he’s doing it while sometimes being literally in the middle of a task. This would be nightmarish enough, but while suffering from a short-term memory that makes Dory the fish look like she has the brain capacity of Sherlock Holmes, Leonard is also trying to Hunt down and kill “John G”, the second man involved in the murder of his wife.
How does he do this, with a lot of furiously scribbled notes – but for the extra important stuff, he retorts to having them tattooed onto his skin making his body a road map of vital information on his path to revenge.
However, while this concept may sound fairly straight forward, the execution is fiendishly complex as the whole story plays out in short installments and in reverse order, giving us the exact same sense of extended confusion as Leonard does as the details of his mission and the people around him change constantly as we go back further into the story to find out new things the further back we go.
Flanked by supposed “friend”, Teddy and delayed in his duties by bar tending femme fatal, Natalie, Leonard is plagued by the fact that he doesn’t know who he can trust – including, it seems, the details concerning his own life before his short term memory was smashed into itty, bitty pieces.
So, detailing this review is going to be kind of tricky – not because I’m planning to write it up in reverse (could you imagine?), but because that even after twenty years since its release, it’s still best to tackle Momento with about as much prior knowledge as our clueless antagonist can hope to grasp on to. Conceptually, in less hungry and capable hands, Memento should have been just noise and details as it’s already twisted story was rendered into near incomprehensible pulp by a gimmick guaranteed to leave you in the dust if you don’t give it your full intention. However, a gimmick is only a gimmick if the director treats it like a gimmick and Nolan treats the topsy-turvy narrative much in the same way that James Cameron tackled the third dimension for Avatar – as something vital to the story telling process as you are kept on the edge of your seat, not by the prospect of finding out what happens next, but by finding out what occured before.
If this style sounds like it could be somewhat restrictive, Nolan proves matters otherwise as he deals out numerous scenarios that make the most of the nail biting story breaks.
At one point we rejoin Leonard as he’s running down the street, completely flummoxed at to what he was supposed to be doing when he sees a man running a short distance away. “Maybe I’m chasing him.” muses our hero, changing direction toward his foe only find out that, nope, the guy is actually chasing him. Elsewhere, in perhaps the most ballsy of plot twist in a movie heaving with them, the winding back of time shows exactly what kind of woman Natalie is and the lengths she’ll go to to get what she wants.
Throughout the movie, Nolan shows that he, or his film, aren’t one trick ponies by lacing the puzzle-like plot with moments of quiet tragedy. In efforts to trick his condition into remembering, if only for an instant, what it felt like when his wife was still alive, he hires a hooker to lay his wife’s belongings around a hotel room, wait until he dozes off and then enter the bathroom, slamming the door as she goes just enough to wake him up in a state of memory reset.
If it sounds like Momento might take a couple of cracks until the idea fully sinks in, I can assure you that Nolan’s got you covered. Laying various markers about the film to act as points of reference such as a broken car window, the scratches on Leonard’s cheek or various notes of mysterious origins and intercut with the backwards action we have scenes in black and white that move forward and give us various backstory involving Leonard’s mental issues that involving him telling the story of Sammy Jankis, a man who suffered with a similar problem.
In a film like this, it’s easy for the cast to be all but swallowed up by the intricacies and moving parts of the plot, but due to an intelligent selection of actors, they also aid in making things work. Guy Pierce, with his movie star looks and his character actor sensibilities, was made to front stuff like this as the movie bounces him from tormented noir hero, to avenging angel, to vunerable victim, to somewhere much, much darker when everything is all finally revealed. Elsewhere, Joe Pantoliano plays the typically untrustworthy sort of character he excels at while his Matrix co-star Carrie-Anne Moss plays against type as a duplicitous woman who has no reservations whatsoever using a man as damaged as Leonard as a blunt instrument in order to get whatever she wants.
While not Nolan’s debut, Memento was the movie that established the man as a filmmaking force to watch as he blended complex, layered plotting with a pace that knows exactly when to stop with the talking (of which there’s understandably loads) and start with the doing and you can see direct parallels between this modest little indie and the gargantuan productions he’s helmed since. In many ways, I still regard it as the director’s most accomplished work.
Now, where was I…?
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