Now I know. You fake it. If you think you’re supposed to recognize somebody . . . you just pretend.
I always have trepidation going back to a movie I love if I haven’t seen it in a while. I just tend not to rewatch movies the way some people do and I certainly don’t, you know, put movies on in the background the way some people do. So there will often be long gaps between viewings of even movies I consider some of my favorites. With Memento, it’s been over ten years for sure, probably more like fifteen since I’d seen it. It isn’t that I fear changing; but it’s just never fun to have one less thing you unreservedly love. Well, luckily, that wasn’t the experience I had with Memento; as, if I kid myself, which according to Memento, we all do, I’ve become a more sophisticated film-viewer over the intervening years, it honestly only allowed me to enjoy the movie even more than I did before. It’s really kind of a perfect movie.
I mean, let’s start with the story and the structure. I mean, this has all been said certainly and probably most of it even by me over the years, but here we go. Obviously, this movie got a lot of press at the time for the way it was structured, with the story essentially told in reverse order as a way to mimic the fact that the protagonist has a brain injury that leads to his inability to make new memories. And just on that level, it’s a pretty ingenious idea. But there’s a lot more to it than that. I kind of brought this up in my Following review; Following is a movie where there’s a story and, in order to give it a twist and make it more mysterious, it’s told out of chronological order. But, with Following, I suspect there are about a dozen different ways you could mix and match those scenes and create a more or less analogous experience. But with Memento, you have a movie that simply has to be told in the way that it is. On the early DVD releases, there was an option to watch the movie in chronological order. And it was helpful if you wanted a little clarity on details you might have missed and it was a curiosity. Was it a good movie? Not really. Certainly not as great as the real version of Memento. Memento has been carefully crafted to, essentially, have the most important moment in the story happen in the middle of the story, not at the end. Nolan says there was never a chronological draft of the script, that the non-chronological structure was baked in from the very first words he put on paper – I believe him.
There’s something else I really like about the structure. It’s typically shorthanded as being a movie told in reverse order and that’s a decent shorthand, but it is reductive because in point of fact, Memento is a movie told in two alternating chronologies, one moving backwards, the other moving forward. I like the way this works. See, I would certainly say that Memento is a film noir; it is more meta than Following. Following was more just a straight-up film noir or maybe even a pastiche; Memento is a film noir, but it’s also commenting on the tropes, tweaking things a bit. But anyway, one of the things I like about a lot of film noirs is the feeling of inevitability they have. I’ve heard people criticize this element as “predictability,” but that’s not really accurate; noir is a bleak genre and one of the ways it is bleak is in the way it often posits that once people pass a certain point, there is no way off the path they’re on. It often features characters who, once they’ve made a certain decision or taken a certain action, are kind of trapped on a deterministic trajectory. Is it predictable? I guess, but it’s also an artistic statement; think about Double Indemnity – that movie was never going to have any end but the one it has, not because the story-telling is lazy, but because those characters made the choices they made and that, inexorably, leads to their downfall. Edward G. Robinson even has a speech about it in the movie, about the inescapability of situation the killers are in. But in this movie, Nolan is executing a pincer move. That inescapable moment of tragic discovery isn’t approaching on the horizon; we’re being squeezed into it along with Lenny. Despite the numerous very significant acts of violence that litter this story, the most important moment, the “climax” of the film, is a moment of discovery, of realization. When the movie begins, the majority of Lenny’s story is unknown to us and, unfortunately, unknown to him as well. But the space of our ignorance is shrinking as the truth approaches from both sides. We’re not rushing toward a climax on the horizon; we’re being crushed in an ever collapsing box. The sophistication on display is, in my opinion, just unbelievably remarkable. Nolan has said the leap from Following to Memento was the largest leap he’s taken in his career as a filmmaker, bigger than the leap from Insomnia to Batman Begins, because it was a leap from, essentially, a movie with no money cobbled together using free resources to an admittedly small budgeted movie, but with actual money, actual resources and actual professionals on the cast and crew. I think it’s also his biggest leap on the creative side. Following hints that Nolan has some talent and will have some success. But nothing in Following even remotely points in the direction of this kind of incredibly precise sophistication.
I suppose, since I’ve been talking so much about how perfect the story and structure function together, that I should address a criticism that has dogged Nolan over basically his entire career, a criticism that has never really rung true for me. That is, of course, the criticism that Nolan’s films are intellectually challenging and engaging, but are unemotional. This criticism is as puzzling to me as it is persistent. I think it’s a criticism you could make with a couple of Nolan films, but as to his body of work as a whole, I just don’t see it. Ironically, I think Following is probably the movie that I think the criticism rings the most true about; it’s ironic because it’s also the movie that probably most of the people making the criticism haven’t seen. Memento is a very cerebral film without question, but it’s also an incredibly sad story where the three main characters (Lenny, Teddy & Natalie) are all very flawed and very wounded and on very tragic arcs.
The performances are really incredible for all three of the main roles. Guy Pearce gives one of his best performances in my opinion as Lenny. It’s a multi-layered performance and it takes some surprising turns. You can certainly imagine a version of this movie where Pearce plays Lenny as a dour, grim tortured soul. And he certainly is a tortured soul; he is suffering. But Pearce plays him as a guy who has a surprisingly sardonic perspective on his situation; terrible as it is for him, he understands the dark comedy of it. He sees the irony of him having the condition he previously encountered in Sammy Jankis (you know, if that’s even real) and he understands the unintentional comedy produced by his condition. One thing I had definitely forgotten was how funny this movie is. I laughed out loud a lot and a lot of it came from Pearce’s deadpan delivery. One example I just have to share comes from a conversation between Lenny and Carrie Anne Moss’s Natalie: “What’s the last thing you remember?” “My wife.” “That’s sweet.” “Dying.” That’s ****** up, dude, but I laughed out loud.
The movie also gets a lot of dark comedy out of Teddy. Joe Pantoliano isn’t one of my favorite actors. Rather famously, Nolan didn’t want him for this movie, but he was so desperate to do the part that he essentially worked for free, which was an offer Nolan couldn’t really afford to turn down. Now, of course, Nolan says he was perfect and he’s right, he is perfect and his performance here is probably my favorite of his performances. He leans heavily into exasperation with Lenny as one of his primary emotions and he gets his laughs while also registering as a fully formed character with his own set of (literally) fatal flaws. Chief among is that, even as he’s turned Lenny into a killer and probably run this scam on him a number of times, he still isn’t afraid of Lenny, is still confident that he can manipulate him. He’s afraid of Lenny for only a split second, realizing who he is after it’s far too late. Equally flawed, though less funny, is Carrie Anne Moss who is also exceptionally good, quite possibly career best. Her character arc is the one that we actually do see in reverse in the movie; Lenny’s arc is kind of its own thing from scene to scene, but Natalie has a really effective and well-written arc that goes from hating Lenny, with good reason, to ultimately caring about him and having a lot of empathy. It’s a beautiful performance particularly in the first third of the movie (which is, of course, the last third of her character arc; confused yet?). My memory of Natalie was pretty sketchy when I rewatched the movie this time and I was a bit afraid she would be underwritten as a traditional femme fatale. One of Nolan’s genuine weaknesses as a writer is that he’s not always great at writing women and also he just doesn’t write that many of them; kind of a chicken and egg scenario there probably. But Natalie is, in my opinion, his best written female character and Moss is up to the task.
God, this review has taken me a really long time to write and I haven’t even talked about a lot of really interesting things about the movie, like the minimal, but effective, score or the really interesting take Nolan has on the ending. He talks about that on the director’s commentary and, without spending a lot of time on it, he’s of the opinion that Teddy isn’t even telling the truth in that big scene where the “truth” is revealed. My reading is that he is; I think that’s more dramatically satisfying from a story and a character standpoint. But then Nolan checkmates me again by saying that he thinks that the only reason people believe Teddy in that last scene is because they want something dramatically satisfying. Damn you, sir.
Anyway, that’s enough. I said near the beginning of this review that Memento is a near perfect movie. And I’ll be honest, I’m only qualifying that with the “near” because I kind of suspect that perfection just isn’t a thing any work of art is capable of. I really do just love this movie unreservedly and, twenty years on, it’s still probably either Nolan’s best or second best film in my opinion. It’s a movie that functions as wildly entertaining and compelling puzzle box thriller the first time you see it; the second time it functions even better as a thriller; and then on repeated viewings, the intelligence and sophistication starts to come out. It succeeds marvelously in every way. 4 stars.
tl;dr – entertaining, compelling puzzle box of a thriller reveals more intelligence and sophistication on each viewing; great performances provide an emotional punch to match. 4 stars.