The best thing about Memento is that it's a gimmick movie that resists being merely a gimmick movie - its story is strong and sure, and the plot twists are dependent on who the characters are and what they are capable of, instead of the other way around. It's about a man named Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) seeking the men responsible for the rape and murder of his wife (Jorja Fox), but is handicapped by the loss of his short-term memory. New experiences fade like a developing Polaroid in reverse.

Which is exactly how the film begins: a hand shaking a polaroid as it undevelops and is sucked back into the camera. The film is told in reverse chronological order, and, in the interest of allowing you to walk into Memento cold, with as little foreknowledge as possible, I will promise to reveal no further data regarding the film's plot in this review. I always say that the best way to see a film is to reduce one's expectations as much as possible, so that maximum joy can be derived from discovery and revelation. In the case of Memento, I cannot stress this enough - we aren't talking of a film like Fight Club or The Usual Suspects, where the whole premise is negated or altered drastically to provide a dazzling twist ending. The entire film is one big twist. Not a haphazard game of nothing's-real that pulls the rug out from under you until you no longer care about the story or characters; more like a conch shell, a spiral that has a definite form and is all the more disturbing due to its twisted logic. I sense that some critics will resent a film that questions both memory and empirical evidence, a film that gives us no sure answers, plays gleefully with our expectations, and toys with chronological narrative in a way that's both ingenious and perhaps a bit smug.

On the other hand, the brilliance of Nolan's filmmaking is that it both obeys the fundamental properties of the cinema and does them proud. Since nearly every film in existence is composed of pasted-together segments of film, shots and sequences, there's nothing dishonorable about doing something new with the ordered assembly of them. (It's not really new, either: Harold Pinter's play Betrayal, which was made into a 1983 film, had such a structure. There's also an episode of the Seinfeld television show like that.) The joy we get from Memento comes from the solving of the mystery, not the solution itself. And the joy that Memento gets from us comes from the fact that, although we think we may know things ahead of time (no pun intended), and although we're armed with the knowledge that Nothing Is As It Seems, we still find ourselves woefully unprepared for what the Nolan has in store for us.

This thriller is smart, quick on its feet, and features a terrific lead performance from Australian actor (born in Oxfordshire, England, actually) Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) in a wired, deadpan update of a classic film noir antihero. Wally Pfister's cinematography is extraordinary in the way that the screen action does not seem to be perfectly choreographed, but in fact probably is. The music, by David Julyan, reminds us of the underlying sadness of Leonard's quest, and the cruelty of happenstance. (There's always a sadness in these kinds of film noirs - Force of Evil, The Long Goodbye). Memento is a rare example of a thriller in which we're not only curious about what happened in the film we saw, but also what happened to the characters before we met them and after we said goodbye to them.

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good for Groups