Man without qualities

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2001)

It's undeniably brilliant in a hundred different ways: Christopher Nolan's noir about a man (Guy Pearce) who can't remember anything prior to the last five minutes redefines how a movie creates "suspense." Pearce seems to know who he is and what his past is--he just can't "make new memories." As if he smoked a monster bowl of skunkweed, Pearce can only recall what has just happened...and just happened...and just happened. To add to the aphasia, Nolan plays the movie backwards, starting at the climax and rewinding. And just to give the audience a real challenge, he splices into this Moebius strip a phone conversation (about another aphasic personality) with an unknown listener--taking place...now? In the past? In a dream?
"That was TOO, MUCH, WORK!" snorted an irate West Hollywood viewer at the end of MEMENTO. What probably really rankled this fellow was Nolan's ending--which, in a cruel stroke of genius, refuses to pull a cool, orgasm-like, Twilight Zone-style rabbit out of the hat, but instead frustrates all our desires to hear cymbals crashing. The greatest part of Nolan's achievement (based on a short story by his brother Jonathan) is that he has us guessing in new ways. Watching a linear, straightforward, Agatha Christie-style whodunit, we get clues based on a) the facts and b) the twitchy character traits of the suspects. Here, Nolan adds a question mark in regard to the time and the level of reality of any given event--making figuring out the big picture on the fly even more of a brain-twister.
All commendable--and the complexity of MEMENTO, down to the tiniest details, is quite extraordinary. But one must bridle a little bit at seeing film noir turned into a Mondrian canvas, or an Alain Robbe-Grillet novel. Part of the pleasure of the genre--and narrative pleasure is Nolan's real, even outrightly stated subject--is in the human factor..of which MEMENTO has none. Noir is not just about story, it's about politics, psychosexual ooze, generational war, hidden kinks. MEMENTO is a story about story. And for all that it gives you to chew on--like what constitutes a human being when memory is peeled away?--it gives you nothing idiosyncratic and fleshly spilling over.
Also, one shudders a bit at the audition-like quality of the movie. (Nolan is now directing a remake of INSOMNIA with Al Pacino.) Like the too-similar RUN LOLA RUN, and also the works of Darren Aronofsky, MEMENTO has a bit of the feeling of a soft-shoe for the studios. Too bad--because Nolan (maybe Nolans?) is a guy with a big, big brain.