Movie Review – Memento

Memento is a thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan. The protagonist Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator, suffers from anterograde amnesia which is memory loss that occurs when you cannot form new memories. Christopher Nolan adopts non-linear narrative storytelling to depict Leonard’s story.

Leonard lives with his wife Catherine. He is asked to investigate Sammy who wants to claim his insurance due to the short-term memory loss caused by a car accident. To ensure Sammy’s eligibility to claim the insurance, Leonard books a doctor for Sammy to do conditioning tests. It turns out he cannot claim the insurance. Then, Sammy’s wife tricks Sammy to kill herself as she cannot endure the pain of her husband’s memory loss.

One day, he wakes up at night and discovers a burglar raping his wife. He shoots the man and fades away by the assault from his back. His wife passes away. Leonard gets a hold of a police report and sets off to track down his wife's killer.

He was an insurance investigator so he had the nature of investigating things. Leonard uses notes on Polaroid photographs and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife, which is the last thing he remembers and he cannot form new memories.

Teddy is the cop who handles this case. He helps him to find the killer of his wife. After Leonard kills the killers, he forgets what he has done. Then, Teddy takes advantage of this forgetful condition. He uses him to earn money. He uses him to kill Jimmy who is a drug dealer and holds a lot of money and tells Lenny that Jimmy is John G who is the one that kills his wife. Teddy is the person he cannot trust but he always sticks with him. Teddy told him that Natalie was trying to use him. He got Leonard to write "Do not trust her" in different handwriting on Natalie's picture, but Leonard crossed it out as soon as Teddy was gone. Leonard eventually kills Teddy by misunderstanding he is the killer of his wife.

The truth is Catherine survives the burglary and raping. Lenny loses his memory and cannot form new memories. His memory goes wrong. Sammy is a con man. Sammy does not suffer from memory loss. Lenny is the one who suffers from it. Lenny’s wife tricked Leonard into killing her by injecting her with too much insulin as she could not endure Leonard losing his memory and then Leonard was put into a mental institution.

Jimmy and Natalie are lovers. Almost everyone in the film makes fun of Lenny’s handicap. Burt was ripping him off by renting him two rooms. Natalie tests his amnesia by serving the barbed beer to him. She also wants to use Lenny to beat Dodd who thinks Natalie gets the money from Jimmy. However, she is not a completely bad woman. In fact, Leonard kills Jimmy and gets his money. He can do anything but he just suffers from short-term memory loss. He would lose his memory during the chase and become confused. He is like a retard when he loses his memory. When one loses his identity, he does not know his life purpose. Every time he wakes up, he just remembers he has to revenge and kill the burglar.

Are his memories reliable? He chooses to believe in fact. He sticks to the path he is going to revenge for his wife which gives him life purpose. He only remembers his wife being raped and murdered as a long-term memory. The other may know the fact but they may not tell you and take advantage of you because of your disability. Leonard does not know who to believe and he is insecure. The film invites the audience to see what happened to Leonard’s brain and experience his condition that keeps on recalling the past and seeing the objective reality. All scenes and the relationship between each character are interlocking.

Structure of the film

In the film, the Polaroid photograph that fades depicts his story backward. Memory is about thinking of the past so the film plays in reverse order. The structure of the film can be explained in the hairpin shape to introduce his past life. Two intertwined timelines occur in the film. The black and white scenes and the color scenes make the audience easier to distinguish the timeline.

The black and white scenes represent the story of another character in Leonard’s memory. The color scenes represent Leonard's life forward in time. The film goes alternately between the objective reality and the subjective view of the main character Leonard. The structure of this film is full of repetition and internal echoes.

The ending of the film does not reveal the exact truth of what happened to Leonard. It left clues for the audience to detect the situation of Leonard. The most interesting part of the film is it invites the audience to be a detective to detect his life. It left confusion in the audience when the movie ended. The audience may watch for more than one time for clarity. After watching for many times, the audience can finally gather all the clues and understand the film. This film requires you to think and keeps the audience guessing the plot. This film consumes your brainpower.

In addition, this story is written by his brother Jonathan Nolan and the screenplay himself. It takes 26 days to make the film.

Visual presentation

The director Christopher Nolan visually presents the story at an advanced level. He is proficient with the technical side of filmmaking as well as the emotional journey of each character. The director makes Leonard’s voiceover to describe Leonard’s situation.

Memory

Memory is the encoding, storage, and retrieval in the human mind of past experiences. Because of the unique condition that Leonard encounters, his condition makes the audience concerned about personal identity, life purpose, the importance of memory, trust in people and human nature that looks down upon the disability and even takes advantage of them. The film Before I Go to Sleep also adopts the topic of memory to develop its plot.

Conclusion

Christopher may be interested in the mystery of the running of a brain as his other film Inception is also about digging deep into a character's subconsciousness. Most of his works show his intelligence.