Film review: Memento (2000)

We re-watched this film because I assigned it for my Philosophy in Film class for the section on personal identity and because I wasn’t sure how well I remembered it.  Turns out, appropriately enough, I had forgotten quite a few important details.  Plus it was good to watch such a perfectly constructed film.  I’m not sure it’s great cinema, but this film is a genius idea perfectly executed (Abre Los Ojos take note).  If you haven’t seen it – shame on you!  Go and watch it RIGHT NOW!  I think it’s clearly the best film by Christopher Nolan, who went on to be lauded for the Dark Knight Batman films (which I found frankly dull, apart from Heath Ledger’s Joker, of course, and he’s only on screen for a grand total of 33 minutes) and Inception, which I confess I have not seen.  But I can imagine that if you ever have an concept like the one behind Memento you will spend the rest of your career casting around for another one like it and never find it.  Here’s the basic idea: our “protagonist” is Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce, who fakes a good American accent) who has a “condition” whereby he cannot create new short-term memories.  Maybe he was inspired by Clive Wearing, but Leonard can at least remember for about 5-10 minutes (the length seems to vary depending on what the plot needs).  He has perfect (or so he thinks) memories up to the night his wife was assaulted and killed, he shot one assailant, but the other one cracked him on the back of the head causing the brain damage.  Since that time he has been searching for the killer, and by the time we meet him he has amassed some “facts” about him (that he tattoos on his body so he won’t lose them), most notably that he is called John (or possibly James) and his last name begins with G, he is involved with drugs (possibly a dealer) and what his license plate number is.  The feature of Memento that really makes it, however, is the way the film is edited: Leonard’s life is, effectively, broken into discrete units of 5-10 minutes, but the film arranges them in reverse order, so we see the last one first and then work backwards.  This of course creates in the viewer the same effect that Leonard experiences: as each unit begins, you don’t know how Leonard got where he is or what just happened to him, the only difference being that you will soon find out, and he will never remember.  (I believe if you bought the DVD there was an option to watch the film in the correct chronological order, which would be worth doing to help make sense of it, but would make for an entirely unremarkable experience.) The film begins (/ends) with Leonard “realizing” that a guy “Teddy” is actually John G and, having taken him to a remote location, shooting him dead, thereby achieving justice for his dead wife.  Good news, right?  Well, that’s the point of the movie.  As we watch, we see that “Teddy” (whose real name is John Edward Gammell) hangs around Leonard a lot, and might be a cop.  We also see another character, Natalie (played by Carrie-Anne Moss of The Matrix fame) whom we first believe (as does he) is helping Leonard, but who is pretty soon revealed to be exploiting his condition for her own ends.  I don’t want to say too much – if you haven’t seen it, it’ll spoil it, and if you have, well, you know.  But some observations.  First, it’s become something of a trope for people to point out how many plots of classic movies are ruined by smartphones, and this is one of them.  Even though it was made in 2000, when phones could already record and take pictures (couldn’t they?) Leonard carries around a Polaroid camera (the opening scene of the film is the Polaroid he has taken of Teddy’s corpse developing – or actually, un-developing, because that one scene is shot in reverse, presumably to prepare us for the structure of the movie) and writes notes on the back of the pictures.  Teddy’s fate is sealed because on the back of his picture is written (in Leonard’s handwriting) “Don’t believe his lies” – and it’s not until the beginning of the film that you see why that was written there.  But if you could record what was going on, it would presumably avoid a lot of the problems in the film (in one key scene, for example, Leonard is desperate to make a note about how a character is really evil but will pretend to be otherwise but can’t find a pen in time).  The other thing I’d forgotten was the entire sub-plot about “Sammy Jankis,” a person whom Leonard investigated as part of his former (pre-incident) job as an insurance claims investigator (like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Double Indemnity).  He had a similar condition to the one Leonard ends up with, but unlike Leonard, cannot even condition himself.  That is, even if you can’t remember things, you can develop “muscle memory” so as to avoid (say) electrified objects in a test that you’ve taken before.  Sammy “can’t” do this, so Leonard concludes that his problem is really mental, not caused by brain damage, which couldn’t explain the lack of ability to condition himself.  This leads to tragedy, as Sammy’s wife (played by the woman who plays Frasier’s terrifying agent Bebe in Frasier) becomes convinced Sammy is faking and tests him by asking him to perform her insulin shot every five minutes instead of daily.  Leonard tells this story to everyone (he has “remember Sammy Jankis” tattooed on his hand) to illustrate that he is better than Sammy because he has conditioned himself to deal with his brain problem by force of habit.  But the last (i.e. chronologically first) scene of the movie (which is much longer than all the others) reveals how he is mis-remembering Sammy’s story.  And in fact, it reveals how much Leonard is the cause of his own predicament because he is prepared to manipulate things to see the world the way he wants it to be.  And I think it’s this message that makes Memento much more than simply a clever puzzle.
Now I think about it, Memento is a brilliant spin on Film Noir.  One of the defining features of Film Noir is the sense of fatalism, and this is often brought out by flashback and voiceover.  For example, in Noir classics like Double Indemnity, D.O.A., Out of the Past and Sunset Boulevard, you begin at the end, so to speak (like the narrator actually being the corpse floating in the pool at the opening of Sunset Boulevard, or the protagonist of D.O.A. walking into a police station to report a murder - his own) and then work backwards, the idea being that the "future" of the characters in the movie is set in stone.  Memento took that idea and ran with it.  Also, like Noir, everybody is out for themselves and there are no clean hands.  One scene I'd forgotten was when Leonard can't find his motel room key and asks the clerk on the front desk to let him in.  The guy lets him in to a room and then says "oops - this isn't your room" - but Leonard finds a bag with his handwriting on it and asks why that's there if it's not his room.  Refreshingly blunt, the clerk admits that, on finding out about his condition, he (or "his boss") decided to keep renting him new rooms every day so they could soak him for as much money as possible.  Of course he can admit this because he knows Leonard will forget in 5 minutes.  So in that respect, having Leonard in your life is like having a very localized Ring of Gyges.  He's a test of character.  And everyone eventually fails it.  And the one who took the longest to fail pays the worst price.