See it twice, or more, depending on your brain

Rating: 10/10 (8 April 2001)

Memento, unless you outright hate it for one reason or another, needs to be seen twice. I saw it once and immediately, as a dumb-s*** 17 year old, jumped to comparing to to the backwards-episode of Seinfeld (not, as I should've the Harold Pinter backward-plot construction he was infamous for). Now, years later, little moments and parts of performances remain in the memory. And now, how curious, to revisit the film with a greater knowledge and appreciation for film art and story construction, not to mention going through a few more Christopher Nolan pictures, and... it's much, much better than I remember it. Just luck, I guess.
Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is a man on a mission, and he'll go after his wife's rape and murder, that is in reverse. Or really, at the start of the film its the end, and he kills a man named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) who we are not sure who or what he's doing there but have some trust that out hero, or just protagonist, knows what he's doing. Does he though? His own tattoos and his own markers are not always the great markers of truth. He says others, like Teddy, lie and can't be trusted, but is it so? The color and B&W photography is symbolic of something, I think, not simply as a gimmick with creating temporal "present" and "past". It's as if they combine to create a real GRAY area, one where it's hard to tell if Teddy is telling Leonard all he needs to know (though he may be a cop in point of fact, who knows for sure what he has for Leonard, or if he'll help him in the end... not).
This is a tricky little movie, but seeing it with eyes fresh and mind ready for anything its really brilliant on the front of construction. A scene ends right where the last one ended, the sequences of Shelby in his motel room punctuate these scenes with his story of another man with short-term memory loss (no "New Memories" as he says repeatedly), and it loops back around again. By the end we have a better idea of what happened, and how Leonard was most likely not at all an innocent in the rape and murder of his wife, but we also don't have the certainty of closure. Only in the point of view of Shelby, who is an unreliable narrator, do we have a real semblance of events.
The effect is disorientating, but never boring, and the film-making is rich and clever and direct. There's no punches pulled by Nolan this time, and his editing is as elegant as his cinematography (the latter was much more for than the former in his Batman movies). And we feel for the characters, or at least character; especially painful is seeing how Natalie really feels about Leonard, berating him with a dirty mouth and then after being punched for egging Leonard on, sits in the car and comes back in to start the "new" memory that will soon fade, much like the polaroid unless its fanned out. The performances rock as well with the script, with Guy Pearce giving a career high point as Leonard (albeit I could just as easily see Steve Buscemi in the role of Teddy).
It's a memorable movie, ironic enough, because we care about the character's plight and descent (or is ascent) into/from hell. He has no life except this mystery to unravel, which may be no real mystery at all. It's a post-modern enigma that is fun to watch, again and again.