DIRECTED BY: Christopher Nolan
FEATURING: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano
PLOT: A man suffering from an inability to form short term memories hunts for his wife’s murderer, relying on notes he leaves himself and important facts he tattoos on his body.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It isn’t weird. Other than the unconventional narrative structure, Memento could even be viewed as a bit of hardcore realism. But it is easy to see why lovers of the weird are attracted to it; the cloudy mystery that attaches to the story and its central cipher doesn’t lift until the very end, creating a disorientation that feels subjectively weird even though the story is actually firmly grounded in reality.
COMMENTS: Here, I’ll make it easy for you with this paragraph. To appreciate just how intricately Memento is constructed, and how big of an accomplishment the movie is, try reading the sentences in a story or essay backwards, from the last to the first, and see how much sense they make and how satisfying the experience is. This time, it’s executed flawlessly. The movie is epistemologically pessimistic, but artistically invigorating; it’s one of those rare, unique plot hooks that come around once or twice a decade, and you can only hope the filmmakers don’t compromise and do invest the extra work required to pull it off. It’s a simple concept but far more than a gimmick; the inversion of cause and effect works wonders. Nothing distracts our attention from trying to unravel the puzzle. The direction and the performances by the three principals are professionally transparent; the script is the star, as it should be in a mystery. Leonard insists that memory is faulty, eye witness testimony is unreliable, and that the only thing he can depend on is facts—the notes he inks indelibly on his own body—but as the story works its way from the conclusion to the origin, we start to suspect that there may be nothing that we can accept at face value. It quickly becomes apparent that it would be Continue reading CAPSULE: MEMENTO (2000)