MEMENTO

Shari L. Rosenblum

Equating memory with knowledge, or pretending to, Memento tells the story of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), recall deficient, in a one-step-forward-two-steps-back sort of rhythm - (f)act, events leading up to (f)act, events leading up to events leading up to (f)act, forward movement back to (f)act, new (f)act - and so on and so forth. The parenthetical (f) is the film's trump card - and poorly played it is.

The motif of Memento is the mock fresh experience - each occurrence unfolds first in a vacuum, so that the viewer, like the protagonist, has no background or foundation against which or upon which to measure his interpretation. The film's ambition is to reverse the traditional viewing experience - to make the viewer less and less sure of what he sees as the film moves forward, even as the protagonist, shaky in the beginning, takes on a greater air of certitude. The concept is interesting, if not ingenious, and director Christopher Nolan uses enough noir and enough twist to make it sizzle in isolated scenes, but the fleshing out is ruthlessly superficial. The more questions one asks about a given scene, the more holes one finds in the story. Like most ideas that dazzle at first glance, it is more clever (in the disparaging sense) than consistent. And it does not entirely work. I spent a good part of the film's second half wishing it were less noir so I could see my watch.

The story is of a man seeking vengeance for the last thing he remembers clearly - the murder of his wife and the blow that took away his ability to make new memories. There is a philosophical overtone that the screenplay never engages - the double strike that makes it impossible for the man to forget and start anew. The film we are given is more focused on schtick than on substance. The man, Leonard, an afflicted ex-insurance investigator, lives via maps, tattoos and Polaroid snapshots of people and things, and notes to himself that he wants to remember. At his side, as often as not, is Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), upon whose snapshot Leonard has written words to live by. The film sets up the words against the images it shows us: it is among the film's cheapest tricks.

At his side when Teddy is not, we find Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), the film's only other major player. The film attempts to make her ambiguous, too - with one line crossed out on her snapshot and something else written in its place - but the ambiguity is never created. She is drawn as the proverbial bitch/tease bartender lady even in her most accommodating scenes. No depth or transformation of character is suggested.

Performances among the actors are mostly good. Pearce stands out for his transitions in persona and Pantoliano shines as always in the role of Leonard's victim, friend and antagonist. Carrie-Anne Moss, however, though sufficient in what she was called on to do, is painfully unable to overcome the role's poor crafting and the misguided hand of the director, who didn't really know what to do with her.

The characterizations as written are also less impressive than one might have hoped. Not a single motivation rings true enough to sustain the revelations that are meant to take us by surprise. It is as if Nolan decided that the elaborate cinematic conceit would blind us to the failure of the story and the people in it.

True, we who saw Fight Club know that insurance investigators often have a dark edge to them, but that doesn't carry us over the other edges of Leonard's character, particularly as we learn more about it. Or over its contradictions, too numerous to list. And nothing explains the conflicting objective images we are given of Teddy. The film depends on our believing that we're stuck in Leonard's perspective, but nothing in the exposition supports that belief. Even Leonard's constant referrals to the words on the back of Teddy's photo or Natalie's seem more audience exhortation than perspective point.

In its best moments, and it does have some, Memento switches from muddled maze of mock mind games to effectively humoristic interjections. These not only release the audience from the tensions the film wants to engender in them, but relaxes them enough so that they fail to question what they see. It is more a coup for intepretative misdirection than for audience management, but it is well-timed and well-appreciated enough for the audience to go along happily.

Only for a while, though. Because the film fails also to get even its peripheral facts straight. Forget the fit of Leonard's suit - that's a movie-language standard, and Nolan attempts, in his defense, to provide some reality cues there. But center stage, albeit in an underthread, the camera takes us back again and again to someone preparing to inject insulin into a vein. Vein. I suppose the American Diabetes Association was unavailable during production, as it apparently was during production of Lasse Hallestrom's Chocolat. But surely, Nolan could have made the effort to get such a simple thing right. That he shows it injected properly in subsequent scenes tells me he just was not smart enough or interested enough to make sure that what he gave us on the screen was substantiable.

Similarly, the Bic tattoo. Now, I admit that I don't know what needle or what kind of ink one might use to self-tattoo, but I do know it is safer to distrust what Nolan shows us. To doubt the credibility of the filmmaker is to distract from the credibility of his story. If the details are not buttoned down in a film about collection of details, the attentive viewer grows guarded. And guarded, the betrayed viewer will groan rather than grin at the film's final "ta-da!".

Especially here. Because of all the disappointments under the gloss, the least forgivable is the film's dishonesty. Nolan and his screenplay claim to present the characters' backwards formations as pieces of a puzzle that were simply missing to us (echoed by the gaps in Leonard's memory or the police file on the murder for which he is seeking vengeance), but in fact, they seem spitefully withheld or intentionally misdirected, rather than simply not yet given. The film does not trust its story enough to let it flow naturally, so Nolan is intent on deceiving us actively. Sharp turns and surprises that don't hold up to scrutiny may reflect bad writing, but when they are deliberately set up to trick the viewer rather than allow him to trick himself, they are simply bad style.

In the end, it is fair to say that Memento has flash, like a photograph snapped in the dark. But it cannot be sustained. And like the unperfected Polaroid of a beginning we've forgotten, it should fade into oblivion in no time.

CineScene, 2001