Unforgettable

Rating: 10/10 (24 April 2001)

Guy Pearce is a showcase of paranoia and confusion in Memento, director Christopher Nolan's dizzying onscreen jigsaw puzzle that plunges the audience into a mesmerizing web of intrigue, obsession, and deceit.
Memento is a film noir that offers a strikingly original premise. Guy Pearce stars as Leonard Shelby, an ex-insurance investigator whose wife was murdered while he lay unconscious from a head injury. The injury, as it turns out, is catastrophic: he can no longer form new memories and only remembers everything before the attack. The story makes for a bevy of confusion as the viewer frantically tries to size up each character, along with Pearce attempting to do the same.
To say more of the plot would be doing the film a disservice. It's a rare cinematic experience where you actually struggle with a character and question everything that you've just seen. Engrossing from its beginning, it never fails to stun in its complexity - not only running itself backwards (we begin the movie at the end and work backwards to a jolting, brilliant beginning) - but also including flashbacks and a separate scene in which Pearce explains his condition, both running tantamount with the main story. Nolan has crafted a unique cerebral teaser in Memento that asks the viewer to partake in the chaotic madness and continues to haunt and ask questions after its brilliant finale, not only about what has just happened onscreen but also questions the concept of memory and what we choose to believe has happened in the past even if our memory isn't totally clear.
Technically, the film stays true to the film noir genre: desolate, bleak, dark, and colorless. The cinematography is handled with jagged splicing and the visual style employed is central conveying the jumbled, boggled mind of Pearce's character. We think we see things, clues are embedded in split second frames assailed at the viewer in bursts of haze.
Guy Pearce gives us his best performance in Shelby, seamlessly getting lost in the profundity of his character's obsessive-compulsive pit. His quiet, understated performance is tragic, heartfelt, entrancing, menacing, and fascinating in his calculating coldness and tender remembrances. Carrie Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano both turn in twisted and wonderfully ambiguous performances as people involved in Pearce's quest for revenge. Surprisingly, we never see the pair onscreen even though the two supporting actors previously worked on The Matrix.
In a time where CGI and special effects seem to be ruling in theaters, Memento reminds us what truly makes a fantastic and truly memorable cinematic experience: innovative storytelling and interesting, sympathetic characters. We needn't see explosions to be entertained, or cars chasing each other at ridiculous speeds, or extraneous gunplay. Not only does the masterpiece that is Memento manage to pull out the rug from its audience and be incredibly intelligent, it manages to raise questions where other films might simply be content to provide two hours of mindless diversion. Memento is anything but mindless and will have you guessing hours after the credits have rolled and is one of the year's best films.
10 out 10