Confusion Reigns Supreme

Rating: Null/10 (9 April 2001)

In director Christopher Nolan's Memento, cryptic filmmaking is taken to new heights as lead character Leonard Shelby (played by the talented and attractive Guy Pearce) grapples with a rare form of amnesia that causes almost instantaneous short-term memory loss on a continuous basis. The last thing he remembers is a brutal incident in which he suffered a head injury when his wife was raped and killed. Consequently, he thrives on taking revenge, desperately trying to find his assailant in a circuitous web of confusion and dead ends. Overall, critics seem to like this topsy-turvy exercise in reverse osmosis, so I expected to be impressed. One of the film's devices is the sequencing of its events, which seems to work backwards from the end to the beginning. We're not just talking about occasional flashbacks either. Instead, we're virtually watching a story in reverse...perhaps a novel, intriguing concept that made excellent fodder for shooting the breeze at Hollywood parties and brainstorming sessions, but which mostly produced confusion to the point of near exasperation when executed. Carrie-Anne Moss as Natalie and Joe Pantoliano as Teddy play low-lifes with ulterior motives whom our memory-challenged character gets involved with, adding sordid characters to the overall pandemonium. But ultimately, the film comes off more than anything as an excuse for a cinematic gimmick, an exercise in pointlessness to the level that one really doesn't care about the disjointed plot or the characters any longer. I and others leaving the theater seemed glad it was over but were haunted by some mysteries of our own: What was really happening in this movie? Should I even care? Why did I see this? Where did I park the car? Oh well, at least it was a bargain matinee. I might have gone on a vengeful rampage of my own had I paid full price.