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copyright ©1999-2001 |
Plot synopsis Leonard Shelby might be suffering from anterograde amnesia, but he knows a few things. That he used to be an insurance investigator, for one thing, and good at his job. And that his life changed on the day he came home and saw his wife raped and murdered. It’s the latter fact that’s left him in his current state: thanks to a bad blow to the head on that awful day, Leonard’s short-term memory has been completely shot. Unable to generate any new memories since the murder, Leonard’s nonetheless determined to seek his wife’s killer, a man named John G., and exact vengeance. So he’s devised other ways to "remember": tattooed notes on his body, Polaroid pictures with pithily descriptive captions. As Leonard tries to piece together what he’s learned, we meet a shifty man name Teddy and a woman named Natalie, both of whom claim to be Leonard’s allies. But Leonard can’t put his trust in anything besides the concrete facts he’s recorded. The problem, of course, is that he has no way of processing these fragments of information: taken out of context, they’re next to impossible to decipher -- making the truth as slippery as Leonard’s bad memory. Review Memory’s a tricky thing; it lies, so convincingly, to reinforce what we’d like to be true. Still, we rely on our admittedly subjective memories of the past in order to understand the present, which in turn informs those decisions that will shape our future. We scribble notes in journals, photograph constantly, wax nostalgic with others who share our past – amass all this "objective" proof – in an effort to reinforce those memories, to confirm that our truth is the Truth. Memento’s protagonist has no memory, so he works on collecting proof instead. Since the movie begins at the end of the story, working backwards in elusive fragments that gradually reach further and further back in time to reveal the past, we experience the story in the same way that Leonard remembers it. With each burst of remembered time, we, along with Leonard, think we get a little closer to the real truth of what’s happened. The plot in and of itself is delightfully twisty-turny, and writer-director Nolan even throws a bit of dark comedy to boot (notably in a scene where Leonard, smack dab in the middle of being pursued by a man with a gun, forgets why he’s running and concludes that he’s the chaser rather than the chasee), but it’s the way Memento plays around with memory, truth and perception that makes it so intriguing. Don’t watch Memento when you’re tired. This movie’s a brain-teaser, and there’s no way to fully appreciate it without your mental faculties on full alert. Even then, the end may very well leave your head spinning, as you try to piece together the implications of everything that’s revealed in those final scenes.—reviewed by Yee-Fan Sun
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