| The beginning of the end
memento
Starring Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starts Friday, April 13
Uptown Screen
Memory and the movies have been intertwined since the dawn of cinema. Classics like Vertigo and more recent films like Suture and In the Mood for Love all have the fallibility of memory at their core, sometimes with more tragic results than others.
With Memento, another film can be added to that list, although in this case the structural puzzle presented by the film is probably of greater interest than the insights it offers about the human condition.
Memento is an intellectually engaging cinematic experiences, but that shouldn’t make the film sound boring, because it’s also an entertaining noirish escapade that proposes what might happen if someone lost the ability to remember almost anything.
This isn’t your typical amnesia flick, though. Leonard (Guy Pearce) has no short-term memory, but he’s clear about one thing – it is his sole purpose in life to find and kill the man who raped and murdered his wife. To tell any more than that would be giving too much away, especially since most of Memento’s impact comes from the disentanglement of its unusual inversion of standard narrative form.
It’s an amazingly simple conceit, but it works well, particularly in a film about memory and identity – it forces us to question everything we see on screen every step of the way, and thereby becomes the kind of mind-fuck that the cinema rarely presents anymore. Memento can leave you feeling a bit befuddled as you exit the theatre, but its clever fusion of unreliable narration, structural irreverence and bravura editing make it, ironically, an unforgettable film. If only its tragedy had been a little less obvious, it might have been flawless. |
