**** (out of ****)
Starring Guy Pearce, Joe Pantoliano, Carrie-Anne Moss, Mark Boone Junior, and Harriet Harris.
Directed & written for the screen by Christopher Nolan, from the short story by Jonathan Nolan.
2001 R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2001
This movie is so clever. It is a plot-machine designed to chew up our brains and spit them out, but it’s not satisfied with that. An inferior movie with the exact same degree of cleverness would only want us to congratulate it; that would be a good movie. What makes “Memento” great is that it sees the tragedy of its central character as being of even greater importance than any concoction of plot. “Memento” is a machine, but it’s a human machine.
Here’s the mechanism: an ordinary man (Guy Pearce) and his wife are attacked in their home. She is murdered and his brain is damaged. But not any kind of brain damage; he cannot make new memories. Everything before the attack is still there, but everything after the attack only lasts for about fifteen minutes. Because he cannot make new memories to cloud his old ones, he always thinks his wife has just died. He has no idea how long she has been dead—it always seems like yesterday—and he is unable to mourn or move on with his life. Now he is after his wife’s killer.
An ordinary movie would think this is enough and work from there, as if our only concern is whodunit. Not “Memento.” It simulates Pearce’s condition as best it can by telling his story backwards. First we see him killing someone, then we see him leading that person to his death, then we see him collecting clues, and everything works backwards, scene by scene. Like Pearce, we do not know what happened before, but unlike him we know what will happen next. This is not simply a gimmick, but the best that the filmmakers can do—short of climbing out of the screen and erasing our own memories after every scene—to create the atmosphere of confusion in which Pearce exists. The plot works like a clever short story in which Pearce maneuvers around a handful of suspects (among them Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss, both of “The Matrix”), who might be helping, who might be deceiving, and in either case he never remembers them anyway. He sneaks about a nameless suburb—motel rooms and third-owner houses and used car lots and tattoo parlors—and keeps notes that he doesn’t understand later.
Still not enough for “Memento.” A lesser, but still good brainteaser like “The Usual Suspects” might be satisfied with an audience that admires its cleverness and manipulation; it might choose surface complexities and over-plotting instead of character. But “Memento” has more heart. Pearce—so good in “L.A. Confidential”—doesn’t hide from the heartbreak of this man’s situation. He detaches himself from it as any of us would—a dead wife and a life ruined to the point of being worse than death, who wouldn’t?—but he gives us this man. We sympathize with someone who wants justice, but we fear him as well, because he is desperate and not in charge of his facilities. We understand his yearning for vengeance, but we understand that vengeance is God’s and he is in dangerous territory. He reaches us not with theatrics—I think Pearce yells once in the entire movie—but with sincerity.
When viewing “Memento” for the first time, I was absorbed by the protagonist’s confusion and the tangle of plot. Afterwards my wife and a friend talked and talked and talked, sorting out the plot and the events and the clues, and wondering over Pearce’s final narration. But the true test of “Memento’s” accomplishment is that, on viewing it a second time, I was less interested in navigating myself through the plot than I was in the poignancy and meaning of Pearce’s situation; I realized that “Memento” is as much a meditation on time and on the permanence of some memories and the fading of others as it is a thriller. Of his wife, Pearce makes the following heartbreaking narration: “I can’t remember to forget you.” This just might be 2001’s best movie.
Finished May 6, 2002.