And you are?...

Rating: Null/10 (17 February 2002)

A few years back, SEINFELD inflicted upon television one of the worst nadirs in the medium's volatile history: the backwards episode. Stephen King used to intimate for purposes of jocularity that he might be able to get away with publishing his shopping list- or some such mundane, domestic record anyway- due to his immense fame and brand inculcation; he of course would never be so arrogant (one of the Monkees- Nesmith, I believe- said a similar thing, only this time it was recording the banal standard of "Happy Birthday [interestingly enough, the Beatles essentially accomplished such a feat]). No one would ever try to publish their shopping list, but that's exactly what Jerry et al. did by synthesizing an episode where, get this, instead of setup/punchline, let's do- are you ready for this, gang?- punchline/setup! That's right, let's do it backwards! Instead of starting at the beginning, let's start at the end! Instead of reading left to right, let's go right to left! The audience will love us, we're practically Gods by now in their eyes, we can get away with anything! This particular lapse into experimental episodic theater met with questionable justification and perhaps challenged too harshly the faithful flock into assimilating a hook which was too sharp-edged for the typical viewer; or, to be more colloquial, it sucked.
I had this show in the back of my mind when approaching MEMENTO. Would it essentially be a bad Seinfeld episode, I wondered. I was really worried while viewing the opening scene, which literally was celluloid run in the unorthodox polarity. I braced myself for the experience, determined to give the sucker a well-deserved chance, for I had heard such laudatory comment about it.
What I discovered in MEMENTO was perhaps a pinnacle of achievement. Could it be genius, the inspired kind? Or, maybe, proactively divined from the center of the human mind? I have no idea. Suffice to say it is a rare beast: an experimental film which actually yields practical results. Mark the genus, the species, capture a specimen, place it in a menagerie, and study it so that we might learn how to raise more of it.
The engine of the film was nothing less than off-the-wall quirky: run the plot from finish to start. Keep the scenes themselves in proper format, but change their locations on the sequence. This would be stupid, of course, if there wasn't a good enough reason for it; I mean, you don't want to run a work backwards just for the sake of running it backwards, do you Mr. Seinfeld? Gratuity was defeated by this: the main character can not hold memories for any significant length of time. And as a character in the film stated: it's like living in reverse. At first I didn't really get the concept, but then it became as clear as a protozoan cell: run the scenes backward, and the viewer immediately empathizes with the sufferer. Talk about being disjointed! I certainly was, and that's what I needed to be. I needed to figure the mystery out along with the main character. The plot certainly could have been done in a conventional way, but then the viewer's omniscient awareness would have rendered the project a useless exercise in typical made-for-premium cable banality. And if you think it's impossible to inject twists and contortions and red herrings into a movie where you see the ending first, I will ask you to think twice, you can count on it.
For all intents and purposes, this is a science fiction film, one theoretically based on a Philip K. Dick tale (Dick would have loved this). TOTAL RECALL is one of the most clever films to ever be recorded, but it is not really open to interpretation due to a certain scene in it; MEMENTO, on the other hand, is one for which many possibilities are equally plausibleit is a chaotic system to be sure, and it invites the watcher to elucidate his/her own equations in the interest of resolving and replicating the fractal nature within.
No thing is perfect, certainly, and the one glaring question I have- unless this was accounted for within the story and I missed it anyway- was why the main character didn't make use of audio/video recording devices. But I suppose it is easily explained away. The point is, I enjoyed the film, and maybe you will as well