Memento intrigues, but fails to connect

Rating: Null/10 (1 February 2002)

On its surface, Christopher Nolan's Memento may look like any other tale of revenge. Loyal husband Leonard Shelby (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert's Guy Pearce) wakes up one night to find an intruder is raping and murdering his wife. When he attempts to intervene, however, Leonard is smashed against a mirror by a second assailant and left for dead.
Leonard's head injury leaves him with a unique malady, short-term memory loss. As Leonard himself puts it, `I can't make new memories.' He knows who he is. He knows everything about his life up until the attack on his wife, but if he talks to you for more than 15 minutes, he'll forget who you are or what you were talking about.
Having no short-term memory is going to make exacting revenge upon the man who killed your wife a little bit difficult. But Leonard is determined to succeed. By using notes to himself (some made permanent as tattoos on his body) and Polaroid pictures, he hopes to piece together enough information to track down and kill the man he knows is responsible.
As I mentioned, on its surface, Memento looks pretty straightforward. But Nolan, who also wrote the movie from brother Jonathan Nolan's short story, has a plan to take away the audience's short-term memory, thus putting them in the same predicament as his hero.
How does he do this? Simple. He tells his movie in reverse. Thus, the audience is constantly having to piece the story together bit by bit, building it in their mind from the end to the beginning. It's a brilliant move, although not unprecedentedboth Steven Soderbergh and Atom Egoyan have used similar time-bending techniques in their films. And like Memento's Leonard, the audience, being left without a short term memory, is certainly kept on its toes.
But a clever idea doesn't always make for a great movie. By telling his story in reverse, Nolan may have the audience relating to Leonard's problem, but not to Leonard himself. Despite Pearce's bravura performance, it's difficult to make an emotional connection with his character. We are not privy to seeing the progressing frustration that he feels, since his progression is actually working in reverse. He is calmer and more in touch with reality at the end of the movie than at the beginning. Thus, we only see his frustration at the beginning without the foundation as to why he's so distraught.
Along for the ride are Joe Pantoliano and Carrie Moss, two characters who come into Leonard's life. Both are trying to help him in his questor are they? We soon question both their motives, but it's never really clear, even at the end of the movie, whether our suspicions are warranted or not.
So while one can certainly praise Memento for its clever devices and excellent performance by Pearce, it's difficult to praise it as a movie experience. Its cerebral device obstructs any emotional contact. And while it's wonderful to see a truly intelligent thriller, the thrills are muted by their lack of emotional weight. Is it really too much to ask for an intelligent thriller with characters we can and do care about?