What does it mean to lose yourself in a memory?
In Memento, Christopher Nolan, directing a film based on a short story his brother Jonathan wrote, strips away the languid sense of reverie and sentimentality that the word "memory" evokes through the story of a man whose memory has failed him and left him a skeleton of a human being.
Speaking of skeletons, Guy Pearce has some really chiselled cheekbones. He plays Leonard Shelby, a man determined to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. He's doing a bang-up job of searching, too, using police records, following up leads, and meticulously recording clues. The only problem is, as he will tell you about seventy times throughout the movie, he has a "condition": he can't make any short-term memories. That is, he doesn't remember anything from one moment to the next, and so he must rely on photographs, notes, and tattoos to tell him who he is. As I'm sure you've heard, Nolan makes Shelby's disorientation palpable to his audience by telling Leonard's story in fragmented segments--and in reverse order.
All this could be read as a allegory, meant to caution against placing too much of yourself outside of yourself (computers and PDAs being the real-world equivalents of Leonard's memory aids) and counting on the fact that everything will be the same when you return. Ultimately--and I hope I'm not giving too much away--Leonard learns that the problem is not in trusting others, but is trusting in himself. But maybe I'm reading too much in to it--no matter, Memento is story-telling at its best. By that, I mean that the film gives its audience the information, and allows them to fill in the missing pieces. As Aristotle said in his Rhetoric (and I'm paraphrasing here), recruiting the audience in the reconstruction of the story is infinitely more rewarding for them than having everything spelled out and spoon-fed to them. (Of course, if you watch the movie in reverse, i.e. the "right" way--easy to do with the DVD--you may feel otherwise, because the narrative is surprisingly simple once the proper sequence of events is viewed.)
So, the film requires some patience and concentration. But there to break up the doom and gloom is Joe Pantoliano, playing Teddy, a guy who may or may not be Leonard's friend. He provides a perfect counterbalance to Pearce's stoic Leonard, or "Lenny," as Teddy calls him (Leonard hates that). For every one of Leonard's solemnly spoken sententious statements (e.g. "We all have nightmares to remind ourselves who we really are"), there's Teddy to inject some reality. When Leonard remarks, "I don't think they let people like me carry guns," Teddy replies, "I fuckin' hope not." Amen.
-reviewed by the ladybug, Feb.16, 2002
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