Thankfully, Memento does an immeasurably better job with a similar hook. Clever, complex, and melancholy, this neo-noir is a murder mystery that keeps you off balance mentally and emotionally. The ravishing Guy Pearce stars as insurance investigator Leonard Shelby, who has lost the ability to make new memories due to a blow he suffered while trying to stop an attack on his wife. He remembers his life up until the assault, and he knows that his wife was raped and murdered and that he has to avenge her death. But he forgets everything that happens to him now within minutes, so to remind himself, he takes Polaroids of people and places and writes notes on them, keeps a thick file of police reports summarized on one page, and, most strikingly, tattoos himself with important facts. (And Joe Pantoliano keeps popping up to "help" him.)
Facts are Leonard's obsession and his downfall. He believes, thanks to his previous investigative experience, that he can read people and that facts will lead inexorably to an answer. But in the end, all he knows is what other people tell him, and he doesn't judge people as well as he thinks. Because we're seeing everything from his point of view and are missing the same knowledge he is, it's just as hard for the audience to know who to trust, too. The scene in which a character who seems to be sympathetic to Leonard suddenly and viciously turns on him jars you out of any trust you might have ascribed to anyone. You can't help but feel sorry for Leonard, because five minutes later he won't remember this betrayal. In fact, because the story is told backwards, you already know how he's been exploited and manipulated by the denizens of the seedy, heartless demimonde into which he's fallen.
The backward structure of the film is intriguing and well done -- scenes end with the opening of the scene that preceded them. I already want to see it again, partly to see if it fulfills its own internal logic, partly to try to figure some things out. It's being compared a lot to The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects, but it's far more complex and ambiguous than either of those. In the end, because you can't trust anyone, you never know the truth. I rarely say this, but I think the movie could have been longer. Frankly, I was so absorbed that I would have liked to go all the way back to the attack on Leonard's wife (incidentally, we never do find out how long ago that was -- it could have been weeks, it could have been years) to see how every single tattoo got on his body.
His fine, chiseled, smooth-skinned, sensual body.... Any movie that requires Guy Pearce to be semi- or fully unclothed for several scenes gets my seal of approval. I've never wanted to be a tattoo artist so much in my life as when I watched the scene where he gets a tattoo on his thigh. And all those close-ups of his soulful blue eyes, and his pained, angular face...
I'm sorry, but honest to god I couldn't hold that in -- it just burst out like some kind of lust-triggered Tourette's Syndrome. I mean, as much as I was enmeshed in the plot, details, and emotions of the movie, every time he took his shirt off, every time the camera focused on his eyes or his lips (those beautiful lips!), my jaw just dropped. He acts, though, and really well, too, heart-rendingly showing Leonard's grief, suspicion, anger, and loneliness (the scene in which he tries to pretend his wife has just gotten up to go to the bathroom broke my heart). His performance is so important in making the audience identify with Leonard and feel his bewilderment and pain -- making the ending/beginning that much more unsettling. In interstitial snippets, we get a lot of exposition as Leonard talks on the phone to an unknown party, especially about Sammy Jankis, a man Leonard encountered in the course of his job, before the attack on his wife, who had the same condition that afflicts Leonard now -- Leonard takes his example as a cautionary tale of the need for organization and as a way to try to make people understand his condition is real. It occurred to me that, for such a cautious, disciplined man, Leonard seemed to be pouring out a great deal of information, but it gradually makes sense -- he wants so desperately to connect with someone that, even though he knows he shouldn't trust anyone, he ends up believing people almost at random.
I didn't care much for Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix or Chocolat, but here she's perfect as the sexy bartender-in-distress, Natalie, with a face like a blade. Joe Pantoliano, on the other hand, has always been one of my favorite character actors, and he's in fine weaselly form as Teddy, whose information nearly always contradicts Natalie's.
Memento is all the things I love: dark, smart, ambiguous, tricky without being gimmicky. It doesn't spoon-feed us a damn thing, and it doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator. If anything, it's maybe a little too open to interpretation -- I can't help feeling a little bit like writer-director Christopher Nolan copped out by refusing to choose an ending (or, rather, a beginning). On the other hand, we're left in the same place as Leonard: each of us will choose to believe what he or she wants, just as Leonard does. So, I take that back -- maybe it's the perfect conclusion after all.
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