Director Christopher Nolan likes to do tricky things with time and narrative, but often risks losing narrative cohesion in the process (see also Inception and Dunkirk). Memento is probably his best film and it’s even more tricksy than usual.
Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is an insurance investigator who suffers from anterograde amnesia – that is, he has no short-term memory. It was lost in an attack that, he believes, also saw his wife raped and murdered. Despite his memory disorder, Shelby seeks to investigate the incident and take vengeance. In order to remember what he learns each day, he writes things down on polaroids and scraps of paper – and even tattoos messages onto his own body – before he can forget it all again. (As someone with a bad memory who obsessively documents things to compensate, I could relate to this a little too well.)
To make this plot even more unusual, the film’s scenes are shown in reverse. Following each episode, we see the episode that preceded it, and so on. Meanwhile, intercut black and white scenes run in standard chronology.
This could have been a horrible confusing mess from the outset, but Nolan handles it skilfully enough that it works as a detective thriller. It is a mind-bender, though, and you may feel yourself getting lost as the plots progress and eventually converge. I think that’s partly intentional, in order that we feel some of the confusion that plagues the protagonist.
Guy Pearce is superb in the main role. You never doubt his condition, even you do wonder how he remembers – every time he awakes – that he’s supposed to be seeking a killer.
Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano are suitably ambiguous in the supporting roles. The film encourages us to distrust them, but then it suggests we should distrust everything and everyone we think we know. The storytelling itself is deliberately unreliable, and urges us to question what we believe to be the “objective” and “subjective” truths that supposedly make up the reality of our lives.
