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
