Old Yorker

  • Memento

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Christopher Nolan (2000)

    Leonard Shelby, on the hunt for the man who raped and murdered his wife, is suffering from the major handicap of loss of short-term memory – the result of a head injury incurred when Shelby interrupted his wife’s attacker.  (The attack is Shelby’s most recent memory.)  He relies on aide-mémoires of various kinds – scribbled notes, photographs with messages written on the margins, and, most remarkably, key facts and phrases tattooed on his body.  These reminders don’t seem to include ‘I am suffering from anterograde amnesia’:  I was never sure how Shelby remembered what his condition was but Christopher Nolan’s approach to the material is so meticulous that it’s hard to believe that he and his brother Jonathan, with whom he wrote the screenplay for Memento, overlooked this.  The film proceeds along two narrative tracks.  The black-and-white sequences move forward in time, the colour sequences backward.  Eventually they converge and all is (sort of) explained.  Christopher Nolan’s fans are notoriously serious in their devotion to his work and the unsurprisingly lengthy Wikipedia entry on Memento includes a section on the film’s structure which concludes as follows:

    ‘Stefano Ghislotti wrote an article in Film Anthology which discusses how Nolan provides the viewer with the clues necessary to decode sujet/plotline as we watch and help us understand the fabula/story from it. The color sequences include a brief overlap to help clue the audience in to the fact that they are being presented in reverse order. The purpose of the fragmented reverse sequencing is to force the audience into a sympathetic experience of Leonard’s defective ability to create new long-term memories, where prior events are not recalled, since the audience has yet to see them.’

    Anyone who enjoys this kind of analysis will probably love Memento.   I think telling stories in reverse chronological order only works if progressing (regressing) into the past reveals things which give greater substance to, or a different perspective on, the conclusive events that you saw at the beginning.   That doesn’t happen in Memento:  you get more information and a couple of twists but the fancy chronology is mechanical.   The film seems to me merely clever (though merely isn’t the word if cleverness excites you).  I don’t think it’s true that the structure generates a ‘sympathetic experience’ between the viewer and the movie’s protagonist.  As an individual, you expect to be able to remember your past:  as the film suggests, identity is bound up in memories available to you.  As the viewer of a film, however, you don’t expect this kind of knowledge – what you expect is for more to be revealed to you, as the film goes on, about who the people in it are and where they came from – and you expect this regardless of the narrative structure.  At another level, Christopher Nolan is designing an unsympathetic experience:  when the audience of Memento see people at a chronologically earlier stage we know who they are from later acquaintance with them, whereas Shelby doesn’t know who they are in spite of prior acquaintance.   A sympathetic experience would be possible only if you felt fully involved with Leonard Shelby.  In spite of Guy Pearce’s efforts, Nolan’s look-how-clever-I-am style militates against that.

    Pearce is very good.  His wiry gauntness expresses monomaniac obsession.  He has a particularly convincing way of registering genuine surprise and hurt bafflement at situations which are repeatedly new to the amnesiac Shelby.  Pearce is pretty well the whole show although there’s good work in smaller roles from Mark Boone Junior as a man at the reception desk of the motel where Shelby’s staying; Kimberly Campbell as an understandably confused hooker with whom he spends a night; Stephen Tobolowsky as a man with the same condition as Shelby; and Harriet Sansom Harris as his wife.  (Shelby looked into their claims in his former life as an insurance investigator.)  The cast also includes Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano.  It’s remarkable that this modestly financed film is so handsomely shot (by Wally Pfister) and finely edited (by Dody Dorn) but the world it presents is as bleakly impersonal as the worlds of Christopher Nolan’s later work.  Although I preferred Insomnia, Memento is better than his more recent movies.   The more successful Nolan’s become, the more grandiose and lengthy the vehicles he’s used to express his limited range of ideas and styles.

    5 March 2013

  • McCullin

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jacqui Morris (2012)

    Don McCullin doesn’t smile much.  At the start of this documentary, his seriousness is a bit alienating.  After not very long, you understand, given what he’s seen as a photographer, why he’s solemn.  McCullin, born in London in 1935, originally wanted to be an artist and his compositional sense is unfailing.  Harold Evans, who, as editor of The Sunday Times, did much to promote McCullin’s work, rightly says it’s the combination of this sense and the ‘news’ quality of his photographs that makes them so remarkable.  The framing doesn’t detract from their immediacy or make them artificial – it seems rather to capture the essence of the image more strongly.  To take just two examples:  shots of a dog in a jeep with Cypriot soldiers and of a frightened woman in Northern Ireland, caught in a doorway as paramilitaries lunge forward, both dramatise a situation and make McCullin’s record of it more natural and more powerfully individual.  The quality is there from the very start of his career behind a camera – in 1959, when he photographed gangsters in Finsbury Park (where he was born and brought up – though you wouldn’t guess it from his accent).

    Jacqui Morris concentrates mainly of course on McCullin’s work as a war photographer but there’s a delightful – and at the same time socially incisive – interlude of eccentric faces in England.  The catalogue of wars between the early 1960s and the early 1980s is dismaying:  I’d forgotten there were so many.  Morris includes some powerful news film but McCullin’s pictures are the heart and the height and the depth of the film.   Don McCullin comes across strongly as a man who has felt compelled to do this work – and often found it exciting – but who has also kept questioning the morality of his doing it.  His descriptions of executions that he’s witnessed are gruelling.  He talks eloquently about the anguished faces he’s captured which, moments away from death, seem to be asking for God’s help (the same help which McCullin, although he’s an atheist, admits that he too has sought in extremis).

    The music by Alex Baranowski is too deliberately muted and melancholy.  What you see and the rest of what you hear on the screen doesn’t need this underlining.   And this documentary isn’t structurally ambitious – it’s essentially McCullin speaking to camera – even though it’s actually rather unusual in that Harold Evans is the only other talking head, and one who’s also well worth listening to (not least in his description of what happened to Times newspapers once Rupert Murdoch bought them).   Jacqui Morris, whose husband David produced the film, also includes excerpts from an interview with McCullin on Parkinson.  This is a reminder that, much as I disliked the programme, the guests, in the 1970s at least, did include people who weren’t stars and who had disquieting things to say.  McCullin was shown in cinemas at the start of 2013 but we saw it as part of the latest series of Imagine this summer.  (Alan Yentob referred in the introduction to McCullin’s recently going back to Aleppo – I assume after the Morrises’ film was completed.)   The same Imagine season also included Robert B Weide’s documentary about Woody Allen (in its entirety – as originally screened on American television).  Although it’s a pity the BBC aren’t prepared to commission entirely new programmes for Imagine, this is one way of getting good documentaries made for or about cinema onto television.

    20 July 2013

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