Memento

“Memento” is brilliant and expertly pieced together. It’s more than a movie, it’s an experience. How is that possible? Unfortunately it’s impossible to describe to you why that is unless you know the premise, so here goes:

Our protagonist (Guy Pearce) is a man named Leonard. He is on a seemingly impossible quest for revenge after his wife’s rape and murder by an unidentified assailant. The attack left him with a head injury that now prevents him from forming new memories. He knows who he is, he remembers everything up to the moment where he suffered the injury but if he has a conversation that lasts too long, he won’t remember how it started. Now, using clues from the night, limited information from the police file that’s gone cold, Polaroid photographs, hand-written notes to himself and help from people he has met, Leonard is slowly tracking down the man responsible.

Now that you have the premise of the film, there is another vital piece of information that you must know in order to understand what this movie is like. The movie is told in reverse, with the scene that would normally be at the very end of this story being shown at the beginning, and so on. This means that just like the protagonist, you don’t know what causes actions or how Leonard go to a spot as its happening. This is where the brilliance of the film comes in. Just like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, where the drug trip the characters go on, and the experience of watching the movie feel like the same, the condition that Leonard suffers and the experience you will get from watching the movie are the same. It’s hard to wrap your brain around this, but even if you’re dubious about it working (trust me, it works incredibly well), have you ever seen a movie that tries to pull a trick like this? It’s a breath of fresh air.

What I love about this movie is that it’s not just a gimmicky story; it would still be just as interesting to watch if it was told in the “normal” order. It’s a story about revenge like no other because it exposes the biggest flaw about going on a quest to get even in a way that no other movie about the subject can. If you were out on the path of vengeance, you might get satisfaction from killing the person that murdered your wife, but that isn’t going to get her back. The purpose of revenge then, is revenge itself. You seek retribution in order to give yourself the satisfaction that you have done something. But what happens when you don’t even have that? What happens when you find the guy and you take gleeful pleasure in making him suffer so intensely that he prays for death, but once the deed is done you can’t even remember it happening? I’m a huge fan of films about payback because there’s something primal about them that is satisfying, but they also lend themselves very well to complicated ideas and paradoxes. This is one of the smartest and most original stories of revenge that I’ve seen.

There’s even more going on with this movie because it plays wonderfully with the condition that Leonard suffers from (the technical term is anterograde amnesia) As the story unfolds you see that many people sympathize with the man’s condition, while others use it to their advantage and ultimately it becomes impossible to know who he can really trust. The further you get into the movie, the more twisted it gets and everything that you think you know gets turned upside down. Once again, it makes you as disoriented as the character in the movie and that’s a wonderful, original and confusing feeling. All of a sudden, sequences of mundane exposition become huge plot twists!

I found “Memento” to be an extremely satisfying experience. It’s so twisty, so intelligently written, so well acted and so well directed that it’s the kind of movie that you can never forget once you’ve seen. I absolutely loved it and I’m very curious to see how it plays out a second time around, or if there is a way to view it in the “correct” order with some special edition blu-ray or Dvd out there. I can’t say enough good things about it. If you’re interested in movies even a little bit, you should treat yourself by experiencing “Memento”. (On Blu-ray, June 14, 2012)