What is truth? Is fact more reliable than experience? Can we rely only on ourselves or must we trust others? How do we know that we are really alive?

Like any really good work of art, Memento is a film that raises many more questions than it answers. You leave the dark theater looking at the world in a slightly new way and the questions stay with you even after the credits roll.

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pierce, also from LA Confidential and Priscilla Queen of the Desert) is a man who has lost his short-term memory. Formerly an insurance investigator, his investigative skills are stretched to their limit when an Incident (his wife was brutally raped and murdered and he was attacked) has left him with only the memories that were formed before that time. He knows how to drive, how to shave and who he was, but he is unable to remember what happened only minutes before. Like a man he had previously investigated for fraud, Sammy Jankins (Stephen Tobolowsky) he only has the attention span of a television commercial – anything long enough to have a beginning, middle and end is too much for him to retain.

With single-minded determination to find and kill the man who killed his wife, he sets out to find the truth.

Leonard, or Lenny as he is sometimes called, does not want to fall into the same traps that he believes Sammy experienced by trying to keep notes of everything he does. Instead, he believes that he can condition himself to remember by instinct rather than by memory. He concocts an elaborate method of “remembering” by taking Polaroid photos and tattooing his body with the facts as he uncovers them.

The writer/director (Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan has a co-writing credit) recreates this condition in the movie-goer by telling the story backward in small segments. Where we see that the beginning of each segment is actually the end of the next segment. Instead of finding out what happens next, we are reaching back in time to see what went before. Like Jeopardy, we know the answer, but what is unclear is the question. As a device it is quite clever, but eventually becomes a bit trying and left plot that doesn’t completely hang together. In spite of some of the inconsistencies, Memento is a worthwhile, entertaining and ultimately haunting movie experience.

As Leonard moves inexorably toward an ending that the viewer already knows we are fascinated with finding out what Leonard already experienced but then forgot. Memento’s ultimate commentary is on our society and the fact observed by George Santayana that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it..


Recommended: Yes

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