People either love or hate Memento - with its plunge into despair, its backwards plot, its hateful characters and its combination of F-bombs, moments of carnage and cinematography that chose realism over style. Although two of its characters are best remembered from The Matrix, you won't see freaky camera tricks or moments of Hong Kong action. What you will see is a dance on the edge of the abyss - and a recklessness that says, "I don't care if we all fall in."

I was a Memento junkie. My first viewing was better than sex. I had to drive forty miles to see the film, then drove back - again and again to show my friends what I'd seen. Not many of them got my obsession with this film. Then again, not many of them felt what I had felt - watching my own life dissolve before my eyes like a Polaroid in reverse: the death of my mother, the loss of my faith and the ever-graying of my world.

This is the film no distributor wanted to show, requiring the formation of a new distributor, NewMarket Films. At its widest release, it made it to only 531 theaters - largely because it was deemed too smart, and too demanding, for Joe Lunchbox. So, a film with a production budget of $9 million took the slow ride around the track, building a following where it stayed in theaters, not four weeks but four months, and briefly made it to number eight before dropping off the radar - to become the sleeper hit of 2001. Snubbed at the Oscars, it was the Titanic of the 2002 Independent Spirit Awards - taking home Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Female, and a nomination for Best Cinematography.

Even today - despite a final take of $25 million that nearly tripled its producers' investment - Memento is the movie most of America has never seen, except through an army of ripoffs. They've seen Paycheck, Fifty First Dates, The Majestic, The Bourne Identity*, The Forgotten, Gothika, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Final Cut. I'm not knocking these other films, which were updates to the "amnesia" genre that preexisted Memento - and all of whom found more successful ways to reach a large audience. I'm just saying the influence of Memento is a little like the motives of its main character, Lenny, perceptible if hard to see.

Memento is the story of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a former insurance investigator searching for "John G," the man who raped and killed his wife. In many respects, he's the heavy hammer of a typical revenge plot: a gun-toting, unstoppable force, living out of motels, questioning seedy characters and willing to put wingtip-to-rectum in his relentless pursuit of the truth.

But that's where Memento turns the revenge plot on its head.

Leonard suffers from terograde memory loss, a condition both similar to, and different from, amnesia. Its victims can remember everything up to a certain moment, but have lost the ability to store short-term memories. Writer-director, Christopher Nolan (Following, Insomnia, Batman Begins) adapted his screenplay from a short story his brother, Jonathan, wrote for the New Yorker, a short story he was inspired to write while studying medicine at Georgetown. In terms of "tale assembly," this means that Leonard can remember the cause of his loss - the brutal attack on his wife - but can't remember anything after that, at least not for more than fifteen minutes. Depending on how stressed he is, Leonard can go forward from five to fifteen minutes before he ends up back at square one, with the searing pain of his wife's death as the last thing he remembers.

This is where Memento adopts a second, ingenious, distinction from others of its kind. Unable to "store" his short-term memories - and clues - conventionally, Leonard has developed a "system" for making sure he doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. It began with writing everything down. But over time, notes can get lost or become too long to scan. They can also be manipulated by third parties. So Leonard has taken two new steps. Wherever he goes, he carries a Polaroid, so he can use a picture to "tell a thousand words." He also tattoos clues onto his body. In fact, when we meet up with him, in a motel room, we discover a man whose entire body looks like a bulletin board.

And that's where we discover Christopher Nolan's third innovation: the intentional retelling of the story out of sequence. This, of course, is nothing new. Quentin Tarentino has made a career out of doing this. But here, the shuffling of the deck goes beyond anything you'd see from Kurosawa, Tarentino or Canada's Atom Egoyan. Nolan seems to tell this story backwards, from the end to the beginning. I say "seems" because the film's editing is actually more complex. While we do begin "at the end," we aren't really moving toward "the beginning," but a point in the story that loops. It appears that each scene is followed by what should be the previous scene. But running alongside this retro-sequencing is a flashback, running forward. The effect is not to tell the tale backwards, but to create a kind of "narrative butterfly." We're moving in from the ends toward a climactic center.

Screw Michaelangelo. I find God in Memento.

Much has been made of Nolan's sequencing as "gimmicky," though every time I hear that criticism I want to kill something small. To my knowledge, Nolan is the first to use a "butterfly sequence" and its use is anything but a gimmick. Where were these people when Seinfeld ran an entire episode in reverse - for no reason other than to do it? Experiencing the narrative out of order puts us in the same shoes as Leonard. It also gives us an alternative to straight voice-over narration, a technique that is often abused by the lazy, yet vital in showing the difference between the subjectivity of a narrator and the objective reality of the camera. Leonard's forward-moving flashbacks, most of which take place in a single motel room, not only introduce us to the character, but are caked with expository dialogue, sometimes as interview-like voices in his head and sometimes as discussions over the phone with an unidentified stranger. The motel room is a perfect visual metaphor for Leonard's mind, which is trapped by a bunker-mentality, an emptiness, a claustrophobic restlessness and an imperfect system for dealing with a world that is often not what it seems. Going backwards through the action leaves us guessing about context every step of the way.

In a way, the backward-moving portion of this narrative butterfly is the most honest version of a detective story ever told. Every detective story seems to be moving forward, but it's not. As the forensic mind pours through the remains and artifacts of a crime scene, the mind is sifting through the layers of sediment and detritus to reach the origins of the mystery. While the tale is moving forward, the intellect is working backwards. Nolan simply kicks us out of our armchair and removes our comfortable distance. In this story, we are thrust into the mystery as we vicariously experience Leonard Shelby's mentally-challenged investigation, which seems to start every fifteen minutes or so.

One of the strengths of this approach is the insight it offers when we step out of our comfortable routine, such as watching the end from the beginning. Nolan singlehandedly turns the revenge plot on its ear (six months before 9/11 would give it new life,) by giving us a bloody plate of revenge before we've been conditioned to want it. The film's opening sequence, a Polaroid shot of a man with half his head blown off, un-develops, little by little, with every little shake of Leonard's hand. It's our first clue that we are going to be working backwards, not forward. The full scene, with a spent shellcasing leaping back into a forty-five and Leonard's victim coming back to life - just long enough to be blown away - is both shocking and repulsive. This is violence stripped of its glory. As we travel backward in time, we're not only going to be looking at the obvious question: Did Leonard shoot the right guy? We're also going to be asking whether the end result - revenge, itself - can ever add up.

This is why I'd rather my kids saw Memento than Man on Fire. Memento is the only revenge plot that seriously questions the logic of revenge, and reinserts a sense of humanity.

Along the way, Memento introduces an amazingly short list of characters, all of them seedy, needy, greedy and meaty. (Paging Dr. Seuss!) The man Leonard blows away at the "beginning" of the story is "Teddy" (Joe Pantoliano), a smirking, cynical, hapless cop who is helping Leonard get his revenge. Leonard, we learn, is a former insurance investigator who suffers brain damage from the night his wife, Catherine, (Jorja Fox) was raped by two men, one of whom Leonard dispatched, the other of whom is still walking the streets. This "mystery man" is "John G" - or so says Leonard's notes, some of them in a police file he carries about, some of them as tattoos up and down his person. Throughout the story, we're not sure what to make of "Teddy," who is likable enough but also "seedy, needy, greedy and meaty." As an undercover cop, "Teddy" has no business helping Leonard take the life of any man, including "John G," but there's something compelling about this case, and "Teddy" is practically married to it, as he tries to reason with, negotiate, steer and steer away from, the volatile "Lenny." If he knew what we know now, he'd have steered a little clearer.

Then there's Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a hardened little vamp who doesn't quite know what to make of "Lenny," who might be a cop, might be a hustler, or might simply be a babe in the woods. I love how we never really know what she thinks of Leonard, though half the time she is ready to cut him too thin to fry, and the other half she is playing mother to his wounded soul. When Leonard first meets her, she is tending bar, he is looking for his "John G" and she is wondering which way the rain is going to come down. Leonard didn't just walk into life at chapter one. Forces are moving and intersecting with the complexity of warring nations, playing chess for keeps. Her lover, Jimmy Grantz, a local drug-dealer, has come up missing - along with a lot of money. Did Leonard kill this guy? Did Teddy? Did another guy, named Dodd?

Dodd (Callum Keith Rennie) is a go-between and enforcer who gives new meaning to "ruthlessness." The action sequences involving this character are some of the best of the film, and they define who these people are in a big, big way. Then there's Jimmy Grantz, himself, a charismatic drug dealer whose smiles betray a ruthlessness all its own, but whose ruthlessness may not be enough for Teddy, Leonard or Dodd. Then there's Burt (Mark Boone Junior), the clerk at a local motel, who seems harmless enough, but who probably knows more than he's telling. I liked Burt, but walking out of the theater, I wondered what this story might look like if Burt had written it.

Some of the film's most heartfelt moments involve Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a figure from Leonard's past, a man who suffered from a condition just like Leonard's, but who Leonard ruled against as an insurance investigator. The problem, as Leonard saw it, was that Jankis, while complaining that he couldn't remember anything for more than fifteen minutes, always had that look of recognition whenever Leonard came to the door - prompting Leonard to have him tested. The lesson Leonard learned, about the differences between conditioning and memory, would help him do the impossible: conduct a murder investigation while plagued with short-term memory loss. But they also haunt his soul as he realizes how imperfectly we read each other.

I can think of quite a few Joe Sixpacks (including my own father) for whom Memento would be a bad choice. If what you're after is a conventional storyline, particularly a conventional revenge plot, Memento is not your cup of tea. If, on the other hand, you find yourself bored and unchallenged by the bulk of movies made in Hollywood, Memento is a tasty treat that hits the spot. It is an unusually smart film, with twists and turns that are invigorating, and a sense of pathos that is completely undeniable. If you're up for two hours of cathartic action, this is the movie to watch. My only caveat is to clear your schedule. This is not a movie you want to watch while folding laundry, or between phone calls. It's not a movie you'll want to start and come back to. It's an all-or-nothing leap into the abyss. Even with all the movies that have snatched bits and pieces from this film, stealing some of its originality, this is still an awesome film, one of the few, that for me, are like a religious experience.

-----------------------------------------
*Yes, I know the novel, and a movie adaptation of it, long preceded the making of Memento. But the idea of revisiting this material, after the success of Memento, is pure Hollywood politics. In Hollywood, they preach about piracy, but there are historical reasons the filmmaking community moved out of New York, to find a spot within fleeing distance of the Mexican border.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age