Memento

Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss

It’s taken me quite a while to catch up with watching this early Christopher Nolan movie, which I had heard quite a bit about but never seen. It never seemed to be available on any of the streaming services I have access to. Anyway, courtesy of the local Op Shop, I found a DVD of the movie and finally sat down to watch it.

Now I really need to watch it again!

The premise is fascinating. Pearce’s character Leonard has apparently suffered some kind of brain injury which has caused him to lose his ability to retain short-term memories beyond the range of perhaps ten minutes. The movie does a brilliant job of trying to give the viewer a feel of what such a life might be like, by using short, out-of-sequence grabs of Leonard’s life. Slowly, as the movie progresses, we get to see a little more context of these grabs, context which often turns our understanding on its head. Are the people helping the protagonist really helping him? Are they using him? Are Leonard’s memories of his wife being raped and murdered real memories? Why does Leonard now suffer from the same devastating condition as the husband of an older couple he was dealing with in his job as an insurance assessor?

At the end of the movie, we are still left with many, many questions. Leonard tries to manage his memory loss by leaving himself notes, many of them literally tattooed on his skin, including a prominent one which tells him to seek revenge for the rape and murder of his wife. What is the significance, then, of a momentary flash-back late in the movie which shows Leonard in bed with his living wife, but with this tattoo already in place?

As I say, I would like to find time to go back and watch the movie carefully again, shot by shot. I really enjoyed it, and it made me think for a long, long time.