Memento Was Utterly Visionary

Note - this article is a re-publishing of an earlier review to combat techincal difficulties on my site. I've been having a lot of them in the last couple of days, so republishing may become a common occurrence.

When I was a child, my parents thought I had short-term memory loss. But as I grew older, it became apparent to me that I didn't have an issue with losing old memories - rather, I wasn't entirely adept at growing new ones. It's a side effect of having severe ADHD, and with time, I learned that I needed to turn to unusual methods to make sure that I didn't forget anything important. In fact, one of my favorite ways of doing this was to write notes for myself.

Sound familiar?

No, this is not merely a tall tale. I'm telling you the truth, and so even if my condition wasn't as severe as that of poor Lenny Shelby, the main protagonist of Christopher Nolan's Memento, perhaps this can help you understand why I connected with it in a way that other people likely will not be able to. What's more, Memento was entirely distinct from anything else being released at the time and still stands on its own two feet as its own beast today. It's unmistakably a Christopher Nolan piece to the very core of its being, and I felt as if I was unlocking new neural pathways watching it. Granted, it's not perfect and bears the trademarks of a newer director with loads of raw talent who's still trying to figure out how to bring his narrative interpretation of the world to bear, but even if Memento may never escape the feeling that it's pretty much a test run for better movies in Christopher Nolan's filmography, I would be foolish to not judge the movie on its own merits, of which there are many.

Memento is a 2000 crime thriller that follows a man named Lenny Shelby who is trying to track down his wife's murderer. The only problem? The night of the murder, he suffered a head injury that has given him an unusual affliction. Lenny's memory resets every fifteen minutes, and he is unable to form new memories post-injury. To combat this, he keeps close an elaborate system of mementos such as photos, notes, and even tattoos that help him remember what he is doing. He's going to find that murderer or die trying.

What was immediately clear to me about Memento is that there are some unusual time mechanics at play, and though I'm by now intimately familiar with how Christopher Nolan movies play with the idea of time, it's still refreshing to see something unusual like this in a movie, something distinct that gives me a reason to watch it. Namely, I love the time reversal mechanics. They're interesting, and what's more, they actually serve a legitimately fundamental narrative purpose and, in doing so, avoid becoming gimmicky. Also, every part of Memento acknowledges its premise, and it's nice to see this wholehearted a commitment to a concept, which Memento uses to effectively contain itself and find fierce focus, impressive intention.

Memento is so complex and yet so minimalistic. It repeats a lot of plot points and scenes by design, and though this could have easily become tedious, the repeating scenes strangely become more and more effective and important the more and more they're repeated. Also, in traditional Nolan fashion, there's some interesting philosophy to be seen in Memento as well. The distinction it makes between facts and memory is an effective one, and ideas like this also give Lenny a very interesting and unique Modus Operandi, a reason for what he does. He recognizes that memories themselves are not always reliable, and is far more interested in facts, a method that raises interesting ideas packing interesting questions.

As for the structural elements of the narrative, I noticed that the sequences that are moving forward in time are shot in black and white, while the sequences moving backward are shot in color. This was a learning curve for me, but once the pieces started to fall into place, the effect was an extremely intriguing one, intelligently established and intelligently executed. As for Lenny, our main player, Guy Pearce's performance is just incredible. He perfectly embodies the vibe of someone who knows he's fundamentally haunted but doesn't quite remember why. He made a type of character I've never seen before and may never see again make sense. It was a smart move on the part of Christopher Nolan to use a lot of narration to put us in Lenny's head, keeping this movie's abstract concept grounded in a sense of graspable humanness and creating some moments of unexpected tenderness. You feel for Lenny's predicament, and so you want him to succeed. We're shown over and over again why Lenny wants what he wants, and so we start to want it as well.

However, though they're used to great effect, some of these repeated aspects of Memento do become tedious in the third act as we come to know more about them, and I found myself wishing that the movie had evolved more by the time its ending rolled around to avoid feeling a little redundant. Not all of the movie's big revelations are misses, but unfortunately, Memento still wasn't entirely able to escape the feeling of being limited by its own premise. Some of the third-act twists don't land either and often end up feeling more like cop-outs than they do legitimate answers. But even if the movie isn't entirely able to solve the puzzle it presents to us, I'd be lying to you if I said it didn't make for an effective story. I loved this movie to pieces, flaws and all.

I can't really believe that I hadn't seen Memento until now. I'm a huge fan of Christopher Nolan's work, and even though this movie does sometimes live in the shadow of Nolan's superior or more popular movies, it's still very good and well worth your time. It's a movie that only someone like Christopher Nolan could make, simultaneously tight and yet endlessly high-concept. At points, it threatens to crumble under the weight of its own premise, but it never really ever does, even if its weighty concepts are simultaneously its greatest strength as well as its greatest limitation. Memento was truly visionary filmmaking, and though it's one of the more obscure films as far as Nolan's filmography goes, this is a movie that I think everyone should watch at some point, even if some of the harsher language might make it less appropriate for younger audiences who likely wouldn't understand the story anyway. When I was young, I'd put things down and forget where I'd put them moments later. I'd walk into a room and suddenly not know why I was there in the first place. I'd get in trouble for missing meetings I didn't even recall existed. Watching this movie wasn't completely unlike watching an artistic exaggeration of myself. I think that this is partially why I fell in love with the truth.

As Lenny puts it, "Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts."

Memento - 8/10

Deuteronomy 11:18-21