"Must be his. I don't think they'd let someone like me carry a gun." (Leonard)

Rating: Null/10 (14 September 2001)

SPOILERS - The most amazing thing about "Memento" is how it tricked almost 50% of IMDB users to rate it "10", and currently include it in the top 10 of movies all-time! What a crock. I guess many are easily impressed by a novel film-editing technique. Reminds me of the early hoopla over "The Blair Witch Project." Having said that, the film certainly is engrossing and entertaining, and I applaud the writer/director/editor for trying something so new. I rate "Memento" 8 of 10, but you have to see it on DVD with the extras to understand it.
Leonard (Guy Pearce) is what the director terms an "unreliable narrator", because he cannot form new memories after his injury during his wife's attack. So, what we see during the film is what Leonard believes is reality. In truth, Leonard has escaped from the mental hospital to find and kill "Jimmy G." We learn that he has killed one man he thought was his wife's murderer, wears his clothes, drives his car, all the while reasoning that these were his all along. At one point he is asked, "Where do you think you got that car? And those clothes? Is that what you used to wear to work?" Leonard answered, "Sure, we get paid a good salary, I must have bought those."
So, with new clothes, car, and residence in a motel (so the movie doesn't end prematurely with his capture at home), and polaroid pictures of each so he can remember the next hour, he forgets about the dead man and resumes his hunt for the killer, which he does and is depicted in the opening scene. The rest of the movie is the backwards unfolding of what happened between the two killings. Who knows how many could have come before, and how many after. "Memento" just is a snapshot in the life of this crazy man, and we are never given a time reference, whether the story covered days, weeks, or months.
It is important to realize the story is told "unreliably" from Leonard's point of view. Thus, it doesn't matter what the Joe P. and Carrie-Ann Moss characters really were. It doesn't even matter whether there was one or two attackers of his wife, or even if she really was killed by attackers, or by Leonard giving her too many insulin shots. The movie was simply a study of a person's thought process and decision-making with the handicap he had at that point in his life.
Ultimately the writer/director does not want his audience to take all this too seriously. He calls it a "film noir". It is an exercise in interesting film-making. He even sprinkles in humor throughout. Like the scene where he and another guy were engaged in a chase and Leonard says, "I wonder why I'm chasing him. OH! He's chasing me!"
Good flick. Rated absurdly high...and you can take that to the bank!