"A cerebral but cool, thoughtful but thrilling, modern classic"

UNCUT

MEMENTO

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Screenplay by Christopher Nolan,
based on a short story by Jonathan Nolan

Guy Pearce (LA Confidential, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Neighbours) plays Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator now dedicated to revenging the rape and murder of his wife. A head injury has reduced his short-term memory span, so all new information has to be noted down, photographed or even inscribed on his body, as he perpetually attempts to re-assemble what has just happened to him in order to move his investigation forward.

The film opens at the end of the process, as Leonard shoots the man responsible for the crime. Unfolding in reverse order, blocks of narrative then retrospectively establish how he came to his conclusion via his snapshots of memory. Femme fatale barmaid Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss: New Blood, The Matrix) and undercover cop Teddy (Joe Pantoliano: Bound, The Matrix) may have aided his investigation, but actions recalled only in short bursts are difficult to judge. The audience, like Leonard, has to forge a pattern of connections from the available fragments so that the end of the film can make sense of the beginning.

When, in the opening sequence of Memento, a Polaroid photograph undevelops back into the camera, it might herald a movie of David Lynch-style weirdness, a dream state narrative where heightened imagery and strange juxtapositions render objective reality temptingly elusive. Lynch, however, is one of the few directors with whom Christopher Nolan hasn’t recently been compared. On the basis of only two films, he’s stacked up critical references to Soderbergh, Roeg, Kubrick and even Hitchcock, but it’s his pace, editing and control that inspire the comparisons. Despite that reverse action curtain-raiser, weirdness isn’t the keynote here.

Indeed, Memento is a film about the desire for structure. Its hero, Leonard Shelby, has been an insurance investigator, dedicated by profession to exploring the motivations of deception and revealing hidden truths. His own traumatic short-term memory loss alters his mental landscape, placing a literally visible emphasis on the fallible process of forming connections between past and present. Now he realises that truth may be in the telling, that the pattern of your narration will form the meaning of your tale. If something tricks you into making the wrong connection, you’ll be off down a blind alley, and even the most relevant piece of evidence may be misplaced to inspire a conclusion as false as it is logical.

This is hardly news to directors, especially in the shadowy genre of film noir into which Memento has already been co-opted. Narrative structure, far from being a rigid framework, can offer a prolonged flirtation with the audience, a striptease where layers are as likely to be piled on as peeled off. What Memento adds to time-honoured patterns of deceptive story telling is the chance to go through the same process as the protagonist. Here our lack of sequential information doesn’t alienate us from the narrative, but forces us, like Leonard, to play an active role in constructing it, and him. Denied the chance to travel directly from one event to the next, we can only illuminate the present retrospectively via fragments of the past.

Jonathan Nolan, whose short story formed the basis for brother Christopher’s script, sees the process as a deliberate provocation: "The crime thriller genre has become a sort of a ninety minute call-and-response session with the audience: they know all the ropes and tricks backwards and forwards. Increasingly, the question for thrillers has become what happens next? Memento is asking a different question: we know what happens next – the first frames of the film are the last seconds of the story. The question here is why? What sets Leonard in motion towards murder in the first place? The murder is a given; the question is the motive. It’s a film that forces us to ask why we enjoy crime thrillers in the first place. There’s something deeply unsettling about Memento because it’s a film that deftly uses the trappings of its genre to subvert that same genre."

Christopher Nolan embraced the chance this provided to forge an active link between audience and character: "One of our goals in making this film was to place the viewer in the role of the protagonist – to make him or her examine the existential conditions of identity and of the everyday process of learning and adding memory. Most films show you a world you can’t beam into. This one’s about showing you the existing world in a different way. I’d like to hope it’s an enjoyable, rewarding, exhausting experience of paranoia. If we achieve that, much of the praise goes to Guy Pearce. His achievement in the complicated part of Leonard was to convey a continual rediscovery of himself – but in a way that engaged an audience, provoking not only identification but also profound discomfort and anxiety."

With his damaged memory, Leonard is an unwittingly unreliable narrator. "When he meets somebody in the film, the audience, like him, doesn’t know how he met them. You don’t know whether you can trust anybody. It calls into question assumptions about who we are, how we know what we’ve done and how we place ourselves in the world. It also undermines the central driving motivation of revenge. He might not even remember achieving it."

Brilliantly integrated as Nolan’s structural games are, none of them is actually new. We’re so accustomed to the complexities permitted by visual storytelling that the flashback, with its instant (though not always reliable) access to the previous events is taken for granted. In films the past is frequently seen to interact with the present, and we surf between the two so effortlessly that we fail to notice how a chronological insert has been slipped in to fill the role of a memory. Groundhog Day provided an ingenious expedition into this territory, by simply replaying an apparent present over and over, as the hero’s life constantly reset itself to the start of the same day, only moving forward to flash back again. The device whereby we start with the final scene of a narrative, revealing just the sort of conclusion that would normally be withheld, has also been played before, notably in DOA and Sunset Boulevard (remember the body floating in the pool?) Even the way the story is told, not literally in reverse (despite that opening Polaroid) but in coherent scenes placed in reverse order, has inevitably been tried before. Novels Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis and The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal all start with a "present" situation that only the past can explain, and each chunk of that past invites a further going back to make sense of it.

Memento, though, makes this structural device not just a retrospective telescope, but a function of both character and situation. The effect is less of an authoritative storyteller imposing a clever re-ordering of events, than of a story which, like Leonard’s sense of himself, only actually exists in the way it is perceived. Nolan was aware that a protagonist constantly re-forming himself from shards of memory would have to be a man alone, in an environment which offered few clues or hooks for contextualisation. Hence his decision, from his own situation of dual American/English nationality, to make this in the USA.

"I never questioned for a minute that it had to be a place, a big place like America, where you can really get lost and where you can create a very anonymous landscape based around the kind of homogenous culture that you get in America. If you set it in England, I think with the regional differences between the ways people look and speak you couldn’t get the same effect.

One of the projects I’m working on now, however, is set in England, and should be a very English film. I’d like to think that my dual nationality will allow me to make films in both places and not feel too out of my depth culturally or too fraudulent about portraying certain aspects of either culture."

Christopher Nolan’s new project will be a film of Ruth Rendell’s The Keys of the Street.

Writer/director Christopher Nolan began making films at the age of seven, using his father’s 8mm camera. While studying English at University College London, he made 16mm films in conjunction with the college film society. Coming into filmmaking via this route of enthusiasm rather than specialised training, he applied similar guerrilla-style production techniques to his first feature-length script, Following (1999). Despite a tiny budget and limited distribution, this British thriller won critical plaudits both on theatrical release and at numerous international film festivals. Memento is his second feature, and his first American film.

"Hanging the narrative together back to front like this starts out as an interesting conceit but soon becomes its own technique of disorientation….This is a cunning and clever film that demands to be seen again immediately, but I’m not certain it would withstand that kind of scrutiny."

"As dark as noir gets, it’s also laced with some smart black humour….Not a film to let your concentration wander, but unquestioningly among the year’s finest and one that will mess with your head for months after you see it"