Overview and analysis behind the shocking plot.

Rating: 10/10 (1 November 2010)

During the movie "Memento," the audience is left guessing throughout the whole movie until the very end. It has a unique style of presenting the plot in which the movie begins with a scene and then it plays backwards from there. While the movie jumps backwards scene by scene, there is also a transition played in black and white that is continuously playing forwards until a certain point. It is not until the very end of the movie where the scenes played in color meet with the ones played in black and white. This is where the climax of the movie occurs and all the revelations of each characters role are revealed. It is a must see and you will not regret it.
In the end of the movie we find out that the main character Lenny, who suffers from short term memory loss, has been tricked by his so called friend Teddy, into killing a drug dealer. Throughout the whole movie Lenny is on a quest to kill the murderer of his wife, who is in fact Lenny himself. Lenny gets the identity of himself and a man named Sammy Jenkis confused and we find out that Lenny is in fact Sammy. It leads us to believe that Lenny has used his brain condition to illicit forgetting what really happened to his wife to clear himself of shame and anger. This caused him to create Sammy Jenkis and allows him to believe that the ones who assaulted his wife and gave him the brain condition were the ones who supposedly killed his wife. We find out that Teddy, who is a local cop, has already helped Lenny kill the man who assaulted his wife. Yet Lenny forgot all about it and Teddy kept the proof and then used Lenny for his own benefit to kill a drug dealer for money. Once Lenny figures this out in the end of the movie he decides to burn all the evidence and leaves himself a clue that indicates Teddy is in fact the one who killed his wife. Lenny then leaves the scene reminding himself that he is still alive and then as fast as it was all revealed it is then forgotten. This leads us back into the rest of the movie in which we had already seen in reverse order.
When the movie is over the audience is left shocked and slightly confused about how to view Lenny. He acts as if he is an innocent man who has now become a conscious free murderer. He forgets everything he doesn't write down but he is the one choosing to leave out the facts that he finds out on multiple occasions that he is in fact a murderer for pleasure. It started as pay back but for someone who forgets the feeling so easily and has no direction to his life, why not make it a hobby. It's odd to think about that he is spending all his effort searching for his wife's killer when in reality it is Lenny he is looking for. He takes the lives of others to free him of guilt which in the end makes him more of a villain than the movies hero.