imaginative and clever, but morally empty

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2002)

(PLENTY OF SPOILERS)
Memento was a neat trick, which I found to be engrossing throughout. Whether or not it was a "gimmick," I thought the gimmick added something, and did partially simulate the character's experience for the viewer; every scene unfolds without any knowledge of the scene before it, meaning you always start disoriented and need to rely on the character's notes to figure out what is going on.
In many ways, it is just a clever way of telling a detective story; detectives try to recreate what happened in the past, and this movie takes it the next step and simply tells the story backwards. Unlike the Blair Witch Project, in this movie the gimmick helped absorb me in the story.
However, the movie has a fatal flaw in my view, which is that it seems to take place in a kind of inexplicable moral vacuum, which prevents any serious identification with (or even belief in) the characters. It is not only cold, as many have noted, but positively barren in terms of anyone in the movie having any normal concern over human life. Leonard is not presented as someone who has any background which would lead him to serial killing, and yet that is what he does, and no one even questions him for a moment, as if bloody revenge is just something that everyone talks about over coffee. The movie takes at face value Leonard's conclusion that murder is the only, best, and most natural way for him to heal.
Leonard believes the world will be a better place if his wife's death is avenged, even if he has no satisfaction in knowing that it happened. At any point, he could simply choose to forget, but the fantasy of revenge gives his life purpose. Fine, I can sort of accept that. But no one challenges him; no one questions him; in fact, people use him to carry out their own dirty business. I realize there are bad people in the world and all that, and I have enjoyed a great many movies about them. However, in this movie, there is not a single person who acts honestly; no one fails to take advantage of Leonard, and no one challenges Leonard's fundamental mission, even as they are fully aware he could kill an innocent more easily than his man (which, in the end, it appears that he has).
It's like a world where honesty and loyalty have never existed, and, since it's neither sci-fi nor a movie about low-lifes or criminals, that makes it a hard world to take seriously. It would have made more sense to me if he were a cop or something, but instead he is a mild-mannered insurance adjuster who really knows his way around with a gun and has no problem assaulting people with tire irons.
But let's say, whatever, he got really messed up by his wife's assault, is hell-bent on revenge, and even though he could choose to forget, he doesn't want to. Ok. But then, if the end of the movie is to be believed, (BIG SPOILERS), it appears that he has already had his vengeance, and after ALL of his meticulous notes that he keeps for EVERYTHING, it would appear he chose to forget about it, invalidating what for him is the single most important event in the world, the thing that makes his breadcrumbs in time worth creating.
But THEN, even better, he makes the conscious decision to forget, again, and choose not just an arbitrary target but someone he knows has helped him, just so that his life has meaning. It's a great one-two sucker punch for the audience, but it makes no sense. He makes a conscious decision that the lives of others (his friends even), *and his wife's assault and death,* are less important than his need to have a mystery to solve. So in the end, he just winds up being truly pathological, which is not really that interesting; he was much more interesting as a wounded man with a mysterious and disabling condition he must push past in order to heal his wounds (if dubiously) and right his wrongs.
(Some have pointed out the "I did it" tattoo in a scene with his wife; I missed this, but since it doesn't appear elsewhere in the movie, it seems like it may have only been part of the weird impressionism of the scene, and not really there; and if he had it removed somehow, then he's even more pathological than I imagined.)
Even his wife's/Sammy's wife suicide by taking advantage of the condition demonstrates a curious lack of humanity -- before ever consulting a doctor or psychologist, she finally chooses to take her own life by allowing their loved one to kill them via a cruel test. Who does this? Again, it is as if, in the world of the movie, people just don't think about life and death in the same way the rest of us do.
And the thing is, a movie is completely entitled to have that perspective -- but it doesn't serve this one very well. This movie is a murder mystery with a main character you have to be sympathetic toward in order to make it through the film, in order to make his journey yours, as well a meditation on the nature of memory. However, the life-indifferent perspective makes it hard to identify, and clouds the discussion on memory. It just gets in the way.
So, in the end, great idea, fine acting, entertaining execution, good brain candy, worth watching for sure, but ultimately hobbled by a serious lack of believability of the motivations of the characters due to an unexplainable indifference to human life and emotion, demonstrated by every character in the movie. It kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth in the end.