Overall Rating
  Awesome: 78.81%
Worth A Look: 13.84%
Average: 1.69%
Pretty Bad: 2.26%
Total Crap: 3.39%
18 reviews, 246 user ratings
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| Memento |
by Erik Childress
"Back and Forth Required. A True Mindshag and One of the Year's Best"
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Memento is a film that people will be talking about. They will be talking when they leave the theater. They will create message boards and chatrooms on the Internet, which will lead to websites with the film’s timeline as people desperately, try to fit each piece of the puzzle in their appropriate socket. Just the way people still discuss “Pulp Fiction” with Marcus’ neck bandage and glowing suitcase, “Memento” will be dissected to the tiniest detail. Theories will be woven, confusion will be had and people will want to see it again and again. Mediaphiles will re-edit the film backwards (or forward) to gain yet another perspective on it. Philosophers will latch themselves onto its resolution and the significance of the collection of artifacts, which define and tell us who we are. If this film gets knocked off my Top Ten List of 2001, then we’re in for a truly special year. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.If you get up to go the bathroom during this film – do not bother coming back. You can’t come back in and ask someone what you missed because you then rob them the opportunity of keeping up themselves. Even when the film slows down enough for you to catch your breath and offer a little dimension of character, your brain is still working overtime to fit the pieces you just saw ten minutes ago. Save your questions and save you applause until the end of the film because people will want to talk about it.
Memento accomplishes the all-too-rare feat of playing fair with its audience. You will discover that the more you try to pick apart its logic, you’ll always find an answer. Some are already trying to tomahawk the syllogism of how Leonard can remember he has short-term memory loss when he forgets everything after his injury. The answer can be found in three little words: “Remember Sammy Jankis.” This isn’t David Lynch’s Lost Highway or The Sixth Sense where the audience is used like Will Hunting trying to decipher an unsolvable equation with tricks and loopholes bigger than Camryn Mannheim’s ego. Even The Usual Suspects’ mystery hinges on a story that is one great big lie. Memento is a dizzying array of brilliance and it’s only appropriate that two of the co-stars of “The Matrix” should be attached to this project as it is a true mindshag. Trust me when I tell you to go before you leave the house and pass on that large soda at the theater.
Is the memory loss syndrome a new concept? No. Dana Carvey used it to varying degrees of success in “Clean Slate” in 1994. Is reverse storytelling an original gimmick? No. The 1983 Harold Pinter adaptation “Betrayal” told its story from back-to-front and even more people will remember the Seinfeld episode a few years back where some of the gang traveled to India (or from) for a wedding that was titled poetically enough, “The Betrayal.” But it will go down as an original because nobody has been able to pull off this kind of straightforward (or straightbackward) revenge material with such brilliance before. Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” wove its avenging angel with flashbacks & flashforwards, but it doesn’t match its wit with Memento, which feels less like a gimmick and more like an exercise in brain stamina. Yet it plays fair.
A plot device by any other words is still a plot device. The discovery of how critics criticize the use of them by filmmakers is simple: If it works it’s good, if it doesn’t, we call it a plot device. Memento uses one to be sure, but its no more a device than making a city bus pace above 50 mph or a rain shower of frogs. Memento’s use of backwards storytelling is a huge step forward in any film year, even if it has been experimented with before.
The two faces that continue to pop up in this journey are the shifty Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and the visibly bruised waitress, Natalie (Carrie Anne-Moss). Both of them have their reasons for helping Leonard, but are they noble or nefarious? Paralleling Lenny’s search for justice is the story he tells of a man named Sammy Jankis who suffered from a similar “condition.” Lenny weaves this tale to an unknown listener on a telephone and through the shift from color to B&W, we are left to our wits to discover what section of the timeline this conversation falls under. All conducted with the skill of an artist who eats Rubik’s Cubes for breakfast, it never feels like just another plot device.
If all that isn’t enough to jog your craw, then how about when you realize that opening photograph is fading instead of developing when being shaken around? With all the technological advances we’ve seen from Pixar to CGI, moviegoers have continually been subjected to the inverted steps filmmakers take to impoverish us from seeing a really well told story. Director Christopher Nolan has obviously recognized this and actually takes to telling his story…BACKWARDS! When one character is killed in the opening scene, even though it’s the beginning it’s really the conclusion and one never wants to reveal the ending. Or is it? Thus, the need to identify with our film’s hero is vastly simplified because we truly feel a sense of short term memory loss getting inside Lenny’s head with only a few notes and a couple of people to guide us through.
Guy Pearce stars in a dynamo performance as Leonard Shelby, an ex-insurance investigator who is on the hunt for the man who raped and murdered his wife. He knows the person’s initials. He knows their license plate number. He has various clues tattooed to his body. An obsession? Perhaps. But due more to the fact that Leonard has short term memory loss. He cannot form new memories and he only remembers events prior to the attack on him and his beloved wife. Aiding him in his quest (other than his tattoos) are a collection of photographs of people, places and objects each with little notes in the margins to remind him of what he believes to be real. And this is all just the beginning of the craw jogging.
My head is still spinning. Still spinning in a way I haven’t felt since, odd as it may seem, when I saw Field of Dreams. That was the last film I can remember where I got so engrossed in a story and the way it was being told with surprise after twist popping up every ten minutes, that it felt like being engulfed in magic. You realized something special was happening and you couldn’t wait to see where if finally took you. Memento is that kind of experience. It doesn’t fill you with the same kind of emotional joy that “Dreams” did, but with the sense of wonder and passion as a film lover that you’re witnessing greatness in the making. “Memento” is as great a film you will see this year or any year with one of the best subtle performances you’re going to see in recent memory.Once in a blue moon a phenomenon creeps out of the cinema. I’m not talking about the big blockbusters we expect from Memorial Day, July 4th and Thanksgiving. I’m talking about something you hear of the festival circuit or a title that gets unanimous critical praise that slowly turns a limited art house release into a word-of-mouth sensation. A “Pulp Fiction”, a “Blair Witch” or even a “Shawshank Redemption.” A “Memento” comes along once in a blue moon when aliens are attacking. If this isn’t enough of an endorsement to see Memento and to give you just a hint of what you’re in store for when you strap yourself into the theater chair to make your head perform a Linda Blair 360, then just imagine reading this review the other way.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4848&reviewer=198
originally posted: 04/24/01 06:19:54
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USA
16-Mar-2001 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
12-Apr-2001 (M)
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