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MEMENTO (Green, go before you forget)
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True fact -- on our way in to MEMENTO, a movie about a man who has lost the ability to form short-term memories, I happened to recognize the usher (from another, entirely different context) and called him by name. On the way out, he had forgotten who I was and called me Gary.
From its opening credits, MEMENTO's story is told in reverse: a Polaroid photograph undevelops as a hand unshakes it. Blood undrips up a wall, eyeglasses unshatter, a shell casing unfalls and a man undies as Leonard Shelby unshoots him. Then, with a wrenching noise, the scene moves forward … but the story once again moves backwards.
Insurance investigator Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce, the dinkum hunk of PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT and L A CONFIDENTIAL) has lost the ability to form memories. Each time he wakes, he thinks to himself, "Where am I?" He orders his life by the notes he has left himself, secreted about his person. He is searching for the man who raped and killed his wife, the trauma that caused his aphasia.
Leonard's aphasia is unpredictable, striking at any time. "If I'm talking to you, I'll forget who you are before the end of the conversation," he says matter-of-factly. One particularly breathtaking scene opens with him running down an alley, trying to figure out why. "I'm chasing him," he thinks, and then, seconds later, "Oh, he's chasing me."
Although the scenes roll forward, the story is told in reverse; each scene opens in a new configuration earlier in time and ends at the moment that opened the previous scene. So we travel backwards through Leonard's post-aphasic experiences, and each time we go backwards, we reinterpret what we just saw in a manner eerily reminiscent of Pinter's BETRAYAL or the mystery structure of TOTAL RECALL. But as we go back in time, we move ever forward in our understanding of Shelby, until, in the movie's climax, we finally understand. Just as the movie begins when the quest ends, it ends at his quest's beginning.
As Teddy, the mysterious oleaginous Italian cop-snitch-watson, Joe Pantoliano (THE SOPRANOS) has the largest role ever for a character shot and killed in the movie's first 90 seconds. Backwards from Teddy we encounter Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss, as enigmatic if not latexed as in the MATRIX, another movie about reality-shifting). As we probe more deeply, the external journey (who was Shelby's wife's killer) is paralleled by an inner journey (what is in Guy's past?) and a moral journey. What do you do when you can remember nothing of what you have done? What do others do when they know you will forget it moments later? Are we absolved of guilt if our victim cannot remember us doing it? For Leonard, all this has a deadly practicality; being constantly reintroduced to people who know him, how does he know what they are telling him is truthful?
The movie is a fantastic intellectual and emotional ride. Pearce takes the same stoic implacability that makes L A CONFIDENTIAL's Edmund Exley such a gripping character and applies it to a same man in an insane situation. Pantoliano, who appears and reappears cascading backwards in time, is a flickering kaleidoscope of oily shiftiness, never palpably evil, never confidence-inspiring. For a full 116 of the 120 minutes, you are groping toward understanding, every tentative inference you have drawn subject to upheaval from a predecessor scene to come, until the final resolution which is satisfying of both the mystery and the powerful theme reminiscent of a timeless thematic precursor whose mention would give away the plot.
So few movies today demand their audience pay attention and then reward that attention with detail. You have to watch, listen, and remember - and it all hangs together (Nancy and I spent our half-hour walk to dinner sorting through the now-revealed causality and concluded it made sense). Go to the bathroom before you start watching MEMENTO because once caught in its web, you will hate yourself if you have to step out … and will never catch back up with the story.
MEMENTO is the best movie I can remember. But then ….