"Memento," Latin for remember, means a reminder of the past, something that can be used to prod the memory or warn about the future. Which makes it an apt and poignant title for writer-director Christopher Nolan's exceptional new film, a haunting, nervy thriller about a man who can remember nothing at all.
That would be Leonard Shelby (compellingly played by "L.A. Confidential's" Guy Pearce), a former insurance investigator with a peculiar and devastating mental condition; a blow to the head as he was grappling with the men who raped and murdered his wife cost him the ability to create short-term memories.
So while Leonard can recall everything up to that brutal moment, nothing more recent stays in his head for more than a few fleeting minutes. He wakes up in rooms and can't remember where he is or why he's there. He finds himself in chases not knowing if he's the hunter or the prey. Even such simple questions as "They treating you OK?" get a frank "I don't remember" as a response.
Ordinary life would be daunting enough with this handicap, but Leonard is after something more. Determined to avenge his wife's death, desperate for certainties that no longer exist, he has become a kind of defective detective, obsessively focused on seeing justice done even though he won't be able to retain its memory should it happen. "Just because there are things I don't remember," he insists, "doesn't make my actions meaningless."
"Memento's" intriguing premise is adapted from a short story by Nolan's brother Jonathan, which was in turn based on a real condition called anterograde memory loss, which Oliver Sacks, among others, has written about. Nolan has retained his interest in the nature of identity and the fracturing of time that characterized his first feature, the unnerving "Following," and added riffs on the possibility and meaning of revenge.
More than a film of ideas, however, "Memento" is a provocatively structured and thrillingly executed film noir, an intricate, inventive use of cinema's possibilities that pushes what can be done on screen in an unusual direction.
Intent on telling the story subjectively, in a way that mirrors Leonard's point of view, Nolan in effect constructed a despairing backward thriller, a film that starts at the end (a bit like Harold Pinter's "Betrayal") and works its way back to the beginning. Yet, paradoxically, the more we find out, the more pieces we can identify, the less we can be sure just what the truth is.
