Confederate Wing

By and large, it must be said that Memento isn’t terribly demanding on an intellectual level. While it indeed wrestles with weighty themes of identity, reality, and perception, there’s also more approachable angles of grief and revenge onto which an audience can more easily latch. Not that the cinematic pop-philosophising is at all too far for an audience to reach, since some occasionally forced voice-overs attempt to speak the thousands of words which Nolan doesn’t always trust in Guy Pearce’s actions to transmit. As open-ended as the masterful arrangement of scenes is, nothing is really left to interpretation on the intellectual level. Leonard becomes a fully realized character, and every question posed is answered. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with such tidiness, but it wouldn’t hurt to let the audience walk away with a personal quandary or two.

Still, if you find yourself unable to engage Memento on that level of comprehension, there’s always the equally well executed emotional level to enjoy as Leonard hunts down his wife’s killer. Guy Pearce’s Leonard is amicably well mannered, despite (or perhaps because of) the increasing distance between the present and his final memory, while Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano (both from The Matrix released the previous year) take turns competing for Leonard’s trust as they try to use him for their own nebulous ends. There are no other major characters from a face time perspective outside of this triangle, yet there are plenty of central secondary ones, including a middle-aged couple Leonard frequently recalls, a bound and beaten man named Dodd discovered in one of Leonard’s motel rooms, and flashbacks to the lingering traces of Leonard’s wife.

While there are indeed talented portrayals across the board (certainly an upgrade from the entirely serviceable yet nevertheless unremarkable spectrum of Following), what Memento will almost certainly most be remembered for is its ingenious assembly. From the very first minute with the un-developing Polaroid snapshot, a very meticulous narrative structure is being built. Black and white sequences in chronological order alternate with colour sequences in reverse, so despite ostensibly beginning at the end, the more pressing question remains how we got there. It may sound initially complicated, but it becomes easy to appreciate and to grasp as colour sequences begin and end on distinct beats that connect easily while the black and white remains a largely coherent stream of consciousness. It’s certainly less chaotic than Following, that’s for sure, but the payoff is still lessened since it can feel a bit too clinical and calculated at times.

Memento mostly strikes me as the sort of film that pretentious art students dream of producing if they weren’t limited by their own paltry means. Coming from a person like me, this isn’t exactly a compliment as I mostly see fine art student products as weird and non-nconformed for its own sake and not for a particular ideal. Nolan is an exception because he uses his talents to create products of mass consumption and not just personal monuments. So while Memento is at times blisteringly pretentious, it’s still a statement that we are capable of enjoying, regardless of personal competence.