Newmarket Films Joe Pantoliano, left,
and Guy Pearce star in Christopher Nolan’s
cerebral thriller "Memento."
By Ryan Joe
Daily Bruin Contributor
“Memento,” written and directed by Christopher
Nolan, is an unforgettable thriller about a forgetful man.
It is a film that defies all expectations, including the
narrative norm of the silver screen.
“Memento” begins at the end, when Leonard (Guy
Pearce) executes the man he believes assaulted his wife. From
there, the film rewinds through time to slowly reveal
Leonard’s dogged investigation in a world where his actions
seem meaningless.
“Memento,” however, isn’t riveting because of
its exceptional story, but rather because of the exceptional way in
which the story is told.
Leonard suffers from anterograde memory loss. In other words, he
can’t form new memories.
“If we talk for too long, I’ll forget how we started
and the next time I see you I’m not going to remember this
conversation,” he helpfully reminds others.
The affliction was knocked into Leonard’s head during a
fatal attack on his wife ““ an attack that Leonard seeks to
avenge. Leonard remembers the attack and his life before the
attack, but everything else is an impenetrable fog enveloping his
barren mind.
The masterful screenplay keeps the audience riveted by giving
them, in a sense, short-term memory loss as well. For
“Memento” to be a conventionally structured film would
be to lose the bleak fascination with the film’s subject
matter.
As the screenplay slowly unravels to supply pieces to a
sprawling and demented puzzle, the audience begins to get a clearer
understanding of Leonard’s condition as well as the cyclical
circumstances that motivate him to action.
To compensate for his fragmented mind-set, Leonard relies on a
variety of notes regarding his investigation ““ tangible
memory inked on paper, snapped onto film, and permanently tattooed
into his skin.
Leonard believes only what he writes, but what he writes may or
may not be accurate. And because he has no memory of any events
following the assault, time bleeds together for Leonard, such that
he can’t even remember how long ago his wife’s death
occurred.
Leonard is aided, so it seems, by the mousy, leering Teddy (Joe
Pantoliano) and by the bruised and battered Natalie (Carrie-Anne
Moss). The question remains ““ who can he trust?
Throughout most of the film, it is impossible to tell
who’s playing what angle when, where, why or how. Leonard
certainly can’t say for sure. The purposely ambiguous
screenplay keeps the audience in suspense with a consistently
unpredictable story line.
Pearce does a superb job in creating Leonard, a man who lives
only in and for the moment. His emotions and his character arcs are
minute and temporary.
Leonard is constantly forced to reassess himself and all his
actions spiral off from his goal of vengeance. Constantly grasping
at his goal as if it were his one redeeming lifeline, it whisks him
unknowingly into a vicious cycle.
Like the best noir figures, Leonard is a fascinating and
empathetic character. It would have been too easy to make him a
brooding and depressed protagonist, smothered by his environment
and brimming with self-pity.
Leonard instead faces down the overwhelming hopelessness of his
situation with a quirky grin and dry wit. Sure, he has no idea
what’s going on, but at least he has a sense of humor about
it.
“Memento” is a cerebral thriller. Nolan seems to
realize the importance of dangling clues just out of the
viewer’s reach. These tantalizing hints, feelings of
something hidden and malicious lurking around the dark fringes of
memory, keep the audience guessing until the end.
Nolan slowly and deliberately allows the film to reveal itself
due to the amazing screenplay in which the events happen one way
while the story is told in another. The result is a quietly
unhinging thriller about a man whose lack of memory will make an
indelible impression on yours.
FILM: “Memento” opens Friday in Los
Angeles.