Overall, great story telling, great flow, disappointing finish.

Rating: 8/10 (4 October 2001)

This movie is truly unique. One of those movies that you MUST see. You just have to experience. All the reviews you read and all talk you hear will not do it justice.
The plot is simple (at first) as we have a person, Leonard, whose wife was raped and murdered and he was attacked during the incident. The whole incident (either the hit by the attacker or the traumatizing effect of seeing his wife die) left him with this illness. He lost his short term memory. He cannot form any new memories. Several times in the movie we see Lenny (Leonard) doing something, and as soon as he loses focus for several seconds, he forgets what he was doing. At one point he is being chased by an armed man, he gets tangled in a few obstacles and when he comes out of them he can't remember why he is running, he sees this man running on the opposite side of the building and he thinks he is chasing that man, as he starts running at him the man pulls out his gun and starts firing.. Lenny then realizes it is he who is being chased. In another incident.. Lenny is harassed by someone who knows his condition, that someone insults Lenny and his wife and then walks out.. Three minutes later that same person walks in (to Lenny trying to find a pen to write down that this person is bad) and the mere distraction of the door opening is enough for Lenny to forget what took place and for that person to pretend he/she was Lenny's friend.
From the get go, there are two things that capture your interest..
One, Lenny is a strange person, he has this weakness that he refuses to succumb to. He refuses to trust anyone or anything but his own observations, sentences like "I know when someone knows me, I just look into their eyes" strike you are pretty confident for a guy with no memory. He places infinite trust in his Tattoos, notes, files and photos. The major facts he finds about his wife's killer, he writes as a Tattoo on his body, his research work on the killer is in a file he keeps with him all the time. He leaves notes in his pocket for things he plans to do, simply by leaving them there, he is sure to revisit them later. He takes polaroid photos of all the important things in his current situation, where he's staying, his car, people he met (and on the back he writes his impressions about them). The techniques he uses to record these memories are not surprising, but the way he trusts his own handwriting and his own remarks on the back of each photo is what strikes you as odd. I believe it is a very accurate depiction by the writer of the story as anyone who has dealt with a disabled person will testify that this form of defiance and reluctance to rely on others is very much a real behavior. As Lenny himself said (describing a case he handled when he was an insurance investigator of a man who suffered from the same condition he later on acquired), "I realized that the look of recognition in his eyes (which made me think he was faking the condition) was actually fake. He was giving that look to everyone who approaches him hoping to give them SIGNs that he is doing better."
Two, the movie is told as two tales.. One moving backwards, and the other moving forwards. The reverse tale is in color and is the personification of Lenny's case. Like Lenny, you see events unfold with out knowing what took place before them. You see he is talking to a man who is trying to help him, but on the photo he has of that man he has written the sentence "Don't trust him" so he ignores the man's advice. You (like Lenny) have to believe the photo (of course as a viewer, you start thinking, may be that's not his handwriting, may be someone forged his handwriting to lead Lenny in the wrong way). And as this story unfolds backwards (with you having the privilege of knowing what would result from each scene because you've seen all the way till the end) the other story (shot in black and white) is moving forward. From the beginning you realize that it is taking place prior to the colored story (Lenny has less tattoos).
Eventually, the two stories meet near the movie's finale. Until THAT point in the movie, it is one of the greatest movies EVER.
But it is the finale that detracts from the movie as the director (or story writer?) tried to leave a puzzling finish to make the movie sound real deep. He succeeded in making the finish puzzling, but he failed in making the finish live up to the level of story telling and overall performance of the movie to that point.
Someone likened the surprising ending of this movie to the ending of the 6th Sense.. All I can say is that this statement would be true if the Sixth Sense ended in you finding out that all those ghosts the kid saw were just actors and that it was all a prank on the little boy. That's how surprising the ending of Memento is.. It's REALLY surprising, but greatly frustrating.