It's hard to tell what's more intriguing in Christopher Nolan's Memento -- the substance or the technique. On one hand, the story is a modern twist on a conventional noir thriller, adding a curious mental disease to the familiar plate of dusky settings and conniving femme fatales. On the other hand, writer/director Nolan successfully uses an inverted storyline to make Memento a bold, inventive piece of filmmaking (one of the most audacious in some time) -- not to mention a crowd-pleasing, psychologically enthralling mystery.

      The audience watches the movie through the eyes of Leonard (Guy Pearce, the "straight" cop in L.A. Confidential), an insurance claims adjuster who has a unique (but real) form of short-term memory loss: he can't form new memories. He's suffered from this condition ever since he survived a severe head injury trying to fend off the man who raped and murdered his wife. He can remember everything perfectly before the encounter -- who he is, where he's from, what his married life was like -- but everything that's happened to him since begins to fade after about fifteen minutes, and so he must rely on Polaroids and hand-written notes as he searches for his wife's killer. The really important stuff he has tattooed on his body, the eeriest of which is a passage written backwards on his chest so that he can read it when he looks in the mirror each morning: "John G. raped and murdered my wife."

      The kicker is that the story is told backwards, starting at the end -- Leonard has caught his John G., under the alias of Teddy (Joe Pantoliano, The Matrix), and does just what he's promised himself he will do when this moment arrives: he kills him. The movie operates like this, in short, five- to ten-minute sequences, which can be likened to blocks in Leonard's memory. Each sequence begins anew, with the viewer groping for clues just like Leonard ("Okay, what am I doing here?"), and ends where the previous one began. It's an arresting, unsettling technique, one which will jar the senses of even the most jaded moviegoer, for whom the linear storyline is a way of life. But it's proof that a good movie is as much about the storytelling as it is about the story.

      Some might say that Nolan's technique is "look-at-me" gimmicky, but there's a significant reason why the story is told as it is -- it's directly related to the mental condition that the main character suffers from. This isn't avant-garde for the sake of avant-garde, it's to help the viewer become completely involved in the movie, trying to piece things together alongside Leonard.

      Besides which, there's the sense that Nolan, working on a short story written by his brother Jonathan, isn't trying to be gimmicky, and he isn't trying to cover up the potholes in an otherwise mediocre movie. Instead, he makes honest-to-goodness film history, using the timeless genre of the noir thriller and enhancing it with a relatively unheard-of storytelling style. Although it's been used before, by literary figures such as playwright Harold Pinter (Betrayal) or novelist Martin Amis (Time's Arrow), never has it been used so audaciously in conjunction with staples of traditional filmmaking.

      Perhaps the most audacious of the movie's features, though, is its insistence on holding the cards close to its vest. As with all psychological thrillers, it features a mind-blowing twist at the end, but as compared to popular thinking-man's movies like The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense, it is far harder to guess. And when the story eventually gets there, there is the tendency for the viewer not to believe what happens -- not because it's implausible or because it reeks of deus ex machina, but simply because writer/director Nolan has planted the worm of doubt into the viewer's mind.

      It's a terrific feat of storytelling, but one that is well-earned. Nolan spends the entire movie working up to his climax, devoting every part of the movie toward the key final minutes of the movie (which are actually the beginning of the story). He uses a second storyline, blocked in between the five- to ten-minute sequences of the primary plot, which develops an important back story to Memento that causes the viewer to question everything: Who can Leonard trust? Is Teddy good or bad? Who is the mysterious barmaid Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss, also from The Matrix)? Is she working with Teddy, and are they using Leonard for their own means? It's in these questions that the viewer's doubt begins to fester like a sore, waiting to be opened by Nolan in the movie's climax. More importantly, it's where Memento explores the manipulation of minds -- Leonard's in search of revenge and the viewer's in search of Nolan's purpose.

      But of course this is all possible because of a fantastic performance in the lead by Guy Pearce. Pearce, who reportedly haggled staffers over the movie's all-important continuity (as the movie progresses, injuries and scars on Guy's body are explained and disappear, as the story moves backwards in time), shows his enthusiasm for the script, essaying Leonard in flawless form. Every sequence begins with Leonard explaining his condition anew (because he can't remember he's explained it before), and Pearce shows the appropriate mixture of feigned recognition and bewilderment in each scene. Supporting players Joe Pantoliano and Carrie-Anne Moss likely drew as much from Pearce's performance as they did from the script, and the credibility of these three performers is key to selling the whole package to the viewer.

      It comes down to this: One of the essentials of a great movie is its ability to completely immerse the viewer, something Christopher Nolan's Memento does without a doubt and almost by default. Featuring a remarkably effective storytelling style, a subtly haunting study of the manipulation of human memory, and a high replay value (people will be coming back to watch this one over and over), Memento is one movie that won't easily be forgotten.

Craig Roush, 2001