A field of forget-me-nots

Rating: 9/10 (3 October 2001)

Leonard (Guy Pearce) has a memory problem: He cannot form new memories. He forgets things a few minutes after they've occurred. This is caused by emotional and physical trauma he suffered when he once woke up in the middle of the night and saw his wife murdered by asphyxiation. Now Leonard's determined to figure how who the killer is. To combat his ailment, Leonard takes photos with an Instamatic camera and writes a sentence or two on the back of the picture. He snaps pictures of people whom he's not sure if he just met - and he's also never sure if they're friend or foe. Among the players are Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), the latter of whom supposedly lost a loved one in a similar matter and who therefore feels a sort of kinship with the traumatized Leonard. The most fascinating aspect of this movie is that it's shot out of sequence. Because Leonard's memories are pretty much kaput (he can clearly remember everything up to the murder, but not subsequent memories), we actually get to see the same scenes a couple of times. No, it's not repetitive. Here's an example. Scene fades in, and Leonard is running through backyards, cutting, juking, zigging, and zagging. He suddenly says - for we can hear his thoughts - "Ok, where am I? He spots another man running nearby. "Oh," Leonard thinks, "I'm chasing him," and he starts to move in the other man's direction. Oops - the man suddenly charges back at Leonard. "No, wait... he's chasing me!" Leonard thinks. And in another scene, we see the events leading up to that particular chase, as well as events after it. It's up to the viewer to place them in the right order, but seeing the scenes out of sequence, I think, is very useful here. Things are clearer when they're revisited with more information. Now, when Leonard writes on the back of the photos, what he writes is influenced greatly by whatever has happened just prior to the photograph's creation. This complicates things greatly; if he thinks someone's a nice person, he'll snap the picture and write on the back that they're a nice person. But later, he'll look at the picture - without remembering anything - and take the words at face value. If it says he liked the person, then the person's good, even though he might not have known much about that person.
There are infinite twists to this movie, and the ending is fantastic. You may know right off that this is no ordinary who-killed-my-wife caper, but you will have a tough time predicting the outcome.