Memento, the product of brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s collaboration, follows an anterograde amnesia patient searching for his wife’s murderer. Director Christopher Nolan adapted his brother’s short story and later came up with the unique idea to tell the story backwards. The structure of the film alternates between black and white segments and color segments. The black and white segments fit together in chronological order, depicting a phone call between the protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), and an anonymous man. The color segments are played in reverse order starting with the end of the chronological events and represent the time in between Leonard’s memory lapses. The innovative structure of the film creates a tense and mysterious drama that makes the audience share the protagonist’s experience because, like Leonard, we don’t know what happened before the scene we’re watching.
Memento falls into our Film Noir series, but as a modern film made in 2000, critics would categorize it as “neo-noir.” While Memento may lack a number of the stylistic traits associated with classic film noir, it exactly embodies many of the noirist motifs. One might compare Memento to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Somewhere in the Night (1946), about an amnesiac ex-marine, in which “memory and identity is an absolute metaphor for the inability of the noir hero to distinguish between benign and malign as he moves through the noir underworld,” critics Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward write. The same is true of Leonard.
The neo-noir tones of Leonard’s identity crisis and memory loss and the cruel subjectivity of the characters of Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) emerge very subtly. The subtlety of Natalie and Teddy make the depressive emotions of the neo-noir genre even more pervasive as their ambiguous motives lurk just beneath the surface of their everyday demeanors, just waiting to take advantage of the confused Leonard. This sense of paranoia is further enhanced by casting Guy Pearce, a relative unknown, to play Leonard. Alec Baldwin and Brad Pitt were originally considered for Leonard’s role and but both were unable to accept, allowing the film to take on a more down to earth feeling without the attending “star power.”
Finally, what makes the film so sharp in all of its facets is the intense passion and attention to detail of all of the actors and directors involved. Guy Pearce personally called the director looking for the part and was on set every day of the incredible 25-day shooting schedule. Besides the tremendous work effort necessary to shoot a movie in 25 days, the director’s attention to detail to create Leonard’s condition, anterograde amnesia – the experience of memory loss of events that follow an injury, as opposed to retrograde amnesia where the victim experiences a loss of memory of events prior to injury – as realistic as possible that it garnered praise from Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch saying Memento is "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media."
Director Nolan emphasizes this realism by avoiding conventional Hollywood touches. In a fight scene where Leonard attacks Jimmy, Guy Pearce insisted on a realistic fight. While on the phone in the black and white scenes Pearce was allowed to improvise his narrative. We hope you enjoy Memento, both as a thought-provoking addition to the noir genre and as a unique film in its own right.
Daniel Preus
Film Club Co-President
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