In search of lost time

Memento has arrived. This eagerly anticipated mind-bender of a film is without a doubt the freshest, most exciting development in independent cinema since Tarantino chopped up and remixed a bank heist in Reservoir Dogs. Director Christopher Nolan, in his second film -- the first to be widely distributed in the United States -- takes the excitement of all the convoluted, innovative storytelling that's been building up for the past decade or so, and finds a dazzling new extreme. Memento raises the bar, and then some, for narrative film.

It's the story of Leonard Shelby (played with authority by L.A. Confidential's Guy Pearce), a man whose only memory is, as he says repeatedly throughout the film, "of my wife ... dying." A desperate attempt to save his wife from a pair of anonymous assailants has left his brain permanently scarred. The treatment is believable, and surprisingly accurate, despite its fantastic-sounding premise. Leonard has short-term memory loss, and can make no new memories. He exists almost outside of time, constantly living in the instant just after his accident, along with the piercing agony and frustration of helplessly watching his wife fade away. Everything past that is a vaguely defined gap, an indeterminate, unremembered passage of time. As passionate as he is, nothing new can mean anything to him for more than a few minutes.

Armed with a system of notes, Polaroids and tattoos, Leonard's life consists solely of the search for his wife's attackers. He tentatively relies on a few acquaintances (are they friends - how is he to know?) to help him, but all he has to go on are a few scribbled references he carries with him. He is the ultimate chump. People can, and do, play games with him, lie to him, exploit him, and nearly without consequence, unless he can get to a pencil before he forgets.

Memento is both a film-noir crime story and a revenge thriller, and it takes those genres to their logical conclusions. Nolan's film is no glamorized bloodbath -- the first image in the film is of the one and only shooting death, and that's seen on a dimly lit Polaroid -- fading as the scene unfolds in reverse. The bullet returns to the gun, Leonard and his friend/enemy ("Don't trust his lies" is inscribed below the picture Leonard carries around) Teddy (played by the Matrix's Joe Pantoliano), walk back out the building together. Rather than build to the revenge-murder, the film gives us all the details and gore, and then tries to explain why.

From the very beginning, Nolan planned to get inside the head of his hero. A straight-forward approach would be a pointlessly maddening and frustrating portrait of agony and confusion. To really dig inside Leonard's brain, the director had to demonstrate his baffling existence. Memento whips narrative around 180 degrees and moves in a fairly straight line -- backward. The audience is almost as clueless as Leonard, and each new discovery seems to raise more questions than it answers.

Until the last third of the film, nothing strays too far from Leonard's perspective. He is possibly the least reliable narrator in the history of storytelling. Having nothing to go on but his memory and the ability to interpret his own scribbles, nothing he knows can really be verified. His memories from before the injury are seemingly intact, but as the film continues to examine Leonard, even those cannot be fully trusted.

The ingenious structure, along with the Twilight Zone-clever plot, in the hands of a lesser director would be no more than stylish gimmicks. Memento places the audience directly in the fascinating, disturbing world of an amnesiac and allows the film to move beyond the inherent melodrama and into a compelling psychological study.

There are no plot twists as audiences have come to expect through films like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense, or even Guy Ritchie's crime films, which are built entirely on empty twists and turns. Memento's twists seem more like natural progressions, each adding another layer to the story, and to the characters. Nolan doesn't go for shock value -- instead, every new development in Memento is a revelation.

Memento offers a new vision of reality, in which events are meaningless, emotions and thoughts are questionable, and nothing else can be known for sure. The avenging hero has to justify his actions. Leonard decides with excessive confidence who will live and who will die based on a few lines on the back of a Polaroid. In the context of the film, it doesn't seem too much different than any of the other revenge murderers of modern cinema. Why does Leonard even pursue the killer if it won't make any difference to him afterward? Nolan's fascinated with his hero/anti-hero's motivations, and his observations, however sensationalized the story may be, will seem much more familiar and valid than anything from the likes of the usual revenge thriller.

Perhaps the film's, and Pearce's, greatest success is that, even as Leonard is revealed to be less and less reliable, the audience will still root for him. All of the supporting cast walk a fine line between trustworthy and suspect, friends and enemies. Pantoliano and Carrie Ann Moss (also from The Matrix) deliver marvelously subtle performances as Leonard's acquaintances, who may or may not be using him for their own purposes.

Nolan wisely plays down the stylized camera effects and tricky editing, as his construction would begin to distract the viewer from the plot with any more additions. As it is, Memento draws the viewer in -- an absorbing, nuanced, great film. It's not flawless, the plot's complexity does at time distance the audience and the film's logic is twisted enough to tangle even the most attentive viewer, but its positives more than outweigh the negatives. It's an enthusiastic display of cinematic bravura that will change the way you look at film, and everything else.

Momento is playing at the Egyptian theater March 30-April 12.