Review: Memento (2000)

Looking back at Christopher Nolan’s Memento almost 20 years after its release, it’s easy to see the film as an operations manual for Nolan’s formal approach and realization of his thematic interests as a director. Even more than Nolan’s low-budget debut feature, Following (1998), Memento demonstrates an appreciation for metaphor, formal innovations pertaining to narrative structure, and a deep-seated interest in film noir, especially as it reflects on American masculinity. But Memento remains so much more than simply the first film to capture the essence of Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker. It’s also a stunning work about memory and trauma, which explores our fundamental need to create narratives about our lives.

For those readers who have not watched the film over the past two decades, let me catch you up to speed. Memento follows Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) in his search for the man that raped and killed his wife. Leonard has short term memory loss, which means that he cannot form new memories; this inevitably hampers his investigation into his wife’s murderer. To compensate, he relies on an elaborate system of note-taking, polaroid photos, and tattoos to catch him up to date each time his memory resets.

Beyond Leonard’s exceptional mental state, the film’s unique hook is that the bulk of the narrative is presented backwards, with each scene ending where the previous one began, slowly revealing the chronological timeline over the runtime of the film. Simultaneously, there is a black and white sequence of Leonard talking on the phone in his hotel room, which is presented chronologically, but without evidence as to whether it takes place before or after the other events in the film (until the closing scene, that is). This structural approach is initially disorienting, but utterly brilliant and essential to the film’s thematic interests.

As with so many Nolan films, Memento fixates on the loss of a wife, which shapes its protagonist’s world and motivates his actions. However, it does more than use the loss of Leonard’s wife as his motivation. It preserves Leonard within the very moment of her loss, since his memory always resets to the time of her death and the moment of his accident. Thus, for Leonard, every day begins with the loss of his wife, which makes the pain of her absence not just a memory that fuels him, but an emotional experience he has to relive anew every day.

Out of this constant cycle of pain and loss, Leonard seeks structure and starts to create an understanding of his word, which relies on repetition. During the black and white sequences of the film, Leonard explains over the phone to an unknown individual that he worked as an insurance adjuster in the past and that he learned about how memories form during a case involving a man named Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), who lost the ability to form new memories and struggled to have any control over his world. Leonard uses Sammy as an operating lesson—he even has “Remember Sammy Jankis” tattooed on his hand so he sees it every time he washes his hands—and so, based on what Leonard saw as Sammy’s meaningless existence, he follows a strict habit of approaching every conversation and action the same way, relying on the fact that his body will remember routines even if his mind will not.

Leonard’s fastidiousness resembles Nolan’s own obsessiveness as a director, both formally and thematically. But it goes even further than mere implication. Leonard’s routine and ordered approach to his world comes to resemble the process of filmmaking over the course of the film. And thus, Nolan uses his habits as a means of reflecting on filmmaking itself, which has proven to be a popular thematic interest of his over time.

For instance, not only does Leonard’s detail-oriented existence follow a script that he writes for himself, literally across his body, but Leonard talks and acts like a filmmaker. During the black and white scenes, the discussion of his habits and motivations resemble the character work that actors and directors do when fleshing out characters—the discussion creates the character at the same time as it examines it. For actors, as for Leonard, the creation of the character is concurrent with the performance of the character; acting out the character brings the character to life. Thus, in this way, Leonard is acting as a new version of himself as much as he is trying to hold onto his past self. He is creating narrative much as an actor or director does.

But Leonard goes even further than this. During an encounter with a prostitute, he instructs the woman to display his wife’s objects, such as a negligee and a clock, around the hotel room “the way she normally would,” which is the kind of direction that a director will give an actor on a film set when discussing the handling of props. The scene shows that Leonard’s way of engaging with reality is to direct reality, often literally directing the people he encounters in order to create the world he wants to exist. The film’s conclusion hauntingly shows the extent to which Leonard is manipulating his own world. The ending makes us realize that Leonard is literally constructing reality the way a filmmaker does, often through the use of images, in this case in the form of polaroids. And as the images of a movie are open to interpretation, so are the polaroids open to new interpretation by Leonard each time his memory resets.

Nolan’s approach to Leonard’s actions as a metaphor for filmmaking anticipate the similar actions of Cobb in Inception (2010) and even Bruce Wayne/Batman in the fallout of the death of Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight Trilogy. This shows Nolan’s belief that the act of moviemaking is constantly in conversation with itself—his belief in “metacinema” to be precise. But this thematic approach also speaks into a strong cinematic legacy, particularly that of film noir.

If you remove the fascinating structural approach and narrative conceit, Memento perfectly resembles a classic noir film. Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, film noir was about more than moody shadows, stylized dialogue, and beautiful femme fatates. It was a means of exploring the disorientation of traumatized men re-entering a world they no longer understood. In late 1940s cinema, this occurred when men returned from World War II and were unable to emotionally comprehend the world they met, which was far more urbanized and feminized than any they’d known before. 

While Leonard isn’t returning from a war, he has suffered a traumatic injury that reshapes the way he encounters the world. Thus, while old noir protagonists would be contending with complicated conspiracies and criminal plots, often hatched by women, Leonard is baffled by mundane reality itself, which shows Memento’s place within the legacy of neo-noir from the 1970s to the present. Nolan takes the subtext of film noir—that these traumatized men cannot contend with ordinary life—and makes it the text of Memento, where Leonard is essentially trapped in the moment of his trauma, doomed to repeat a cycle of sadness, investigation, and revenge because he is incapable of knowing better—and doesn’t want to. Furthermore, his entire created identity is based on the notion of masculine agency. The bitter irony is that as Leonard is robbed of true agency in the world, he forms an identity that is entirely dependent on controlling the fallout of his wife’s death. And so, much like film noir protagonists of the past, his own ego plays into the disorder of the world he encounters.

This engagement with film noir themes gives the film a classic appeal even as its structural approach is entirely postmodern. While I wanted to spend the majority of this review examining how Memento plays into Nolan’s thematic interests, I don’t want to give short shrift to his formal approach, which is brilliant. By flipping the chronology of the film, Nolan puts the viewer into a similar headspace as Leonard, where every single scene begins without context. Just like Leonard, the viewer is forced to piece together the motivations and underpinnings of whatever they are encountering, while still understanding the larger arc of the plot, such as Leonard’s motivation for his actions and his ultimate goal. It’s a stunning manner of tying the viewer to Leonard while also ensuring that the film is comprehensible. Because while the cause-and-effect is unknown, each scene clarifies a bit more of what is happening, forcing the viewer to investigate as Leonard investigates, and eventually outpace him in an understanding of what is occurring. When that overarching understanding finally occurs, it’s immensely satisfying.

As well, there are several subtle formal techniques that help the experimental structure remain mysterious, but comprehensible. One such approach is Nolan’s use of brief flashes to black between each scene. In Following, Nolan uses varying lengths of flashes to black to indicate the timeline of the film—for instance, shorter flashes indicate scenes earlier in the chronology, longer flashes scenes later, and so forth. In Memento, Nolan forgoes the varying lengths of flashes and instead uses a single flash to cut back and forth between the black and white scenes and the colour ones. The black and white scenes move forward, while the colour ones move backward, eventually meeting and bending back on themselves like a mobius strip. The cutting back and forth is initially puzzling, but it follows such a strict order that it becomes a comfortable way of encountering the story. The sheer repetition teaches the viewer how to engage with the film, as if the routine is emblematic of Leonard himself and his routine of learning through repetition.

The polaroids are another means of tying the audience’s perspective to Leonard’s, as we’re only ever given the same information about them as he is, whether that’s the writing on the back of them, or Teddy’s (Joe Pantoliano) or Natalie’s (Carrie-Anne Moss) comments about them. It’s also important to point out something that is abundantly obvious, but needs to be mentioned regardless: the entire film is tied to Leonard’s perspective. Aside from the vignettes of Sammy Jankis and his wife, which are something that Leonard is talking about in the black and white scenes, Leonard is in every scene and every action is tied to his experience. Thus, the viewer works with a limited perspective throughout the entire course of the film, expressing a literary concept of first-person narration within a uniquely cinematic manner. 

However, Nolan uses the ingenious editing structure to recontextualize moments we’ve seen earlier in the film by repeating events at the end of scenes that were present in the beginning of previous ones. This recontextualizes these moments based on the information that we’ve learned over the course of the subsequent scenes. Because unlike Leonard, the viewer remembers the cumulative information divulged over the course of the film, which imbues the entire film with tragedy. Even as we are tied exclusively to Leonard’s perspective, because we can remember and he cannot, we start to recognize his own destructive impulses before he does and can perceive the emotionally devastating fallout of his actions.

It’s hard to overstate the brilliance of Memento. Although it’s not Nolan’s debut, it’s one of the most assured early works by a director, simultaneously defining his unique thematic interests as a director while delivering an enthralling mystery with an unmatched narrative conceit. It’s rare for a director to deliver a film so fully formed so early in their career. But based on the excellent films that Nolan has made in the 20 years since Memento, perhaps the film’s quality should not be surprising. By his second film, Nolan showed that he was among Hollywood’s best directors and he has never looked back since.

10 out of 10

Memento (2000, USA)

Directed by Christopher Nolan; written by Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Jonathan Nolan; starring Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, Mark Boone Junior, Callum Keith Rennie, Stephen Tobolowsky, Harriet Sansom Harris, Larry Holden.

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