Thoughts on Memento

I'd heard about the basic idea behind this film, and a friend strongly recommended it to me. In fact, he compared it favorably to The Singing Detective, thus sending my expectations through the roof. So it is possible that part of my problem with this film is that very few movies could live up to the praise I perceived it to be receiving from the people I knew who'd seen it.

After seeing the film, though, I came to think that it had many fundamental problems, and that regardless of whether or not my pre-viewing expectations were set too high, the film is seriously flawed. To elaborate, I'll have to give away spoilers, so stop here if you haven't yet seen the film....

...Ok, the problems, as I see them, with Memento:

Let's start with the minor logical flaws. In a "better" movie -- i.e., one I liked more :-) -- these are the kind of trivial complaints I'd easily overlook. But given the "puzzle" nature of this movie, I think these details hurt the film.
- If Lenny can't remember anything after the accident, how does he remember that he has this memory problem? He should be just like Mr. Jankis -- blissfully unaware of his condition, or at least, not able to remember he has it for more than a few minutes after being told by his doctor.
- Even if we grant that he can remember that he has this condition, how does he remember that he is supposed to believe all the junk tattooed to his body? I found this a bit hard to swallow. If I woke up each morning and discovered my whole body covered with tattoos, I'd question who put them there and whether I should believe them or not. But Lenny never does, which struck me as absurd.
More serious are the dramatic flaws. The film completely failed to involve me emotionally. Because Lenny can't really know if he should trust the people around him, an attentive viewer is also going to be wary of trusting the characters he interacts with. This means we're preparing for betrayals all along, so when they come, their mere existence doesn't surprise us. What would make the betrayals more interesting or affecting is if they had some deeper meaning. But the betrayals Lenny experiences at the hands of Teddy and Natalie don't seem to have any great cosmic/metaphysical/philosophical significance. They are just plot points in a movie that probably has too many plot complications already. Actually, there is a kind of ironic parallel between Natalie's situation and Lenny's. She, like Lenny, is pursuing an extremely cold, calculated revenge for the death of her partner. In one case, Lenny is the victim, but in her case, Lenny is the perpetrator. But I never felt the film really made anything out of this irony that stuck with me at more than a superficial intellectual/analysis level. Like most of the themes the plot and construction of this movie would seem to raise -- "The Nature of Truth", "The Problem of Trust", "Perception vs. Reality", "Free Will vs. Chance", etc. -- I had a stupefying "so what?" reaction to it. The film never seems to dig in and explore any of these themes. It seems to be satisfied to merely hint at them, as if giving us an essay's title were the same thing as giving us the essay itself.

Furthermore, because Lenny has no past, he can't build relationships with anyone, or at least, not deep ones. Betrayal by one you love and/or trust is painful, but Lenny can't love or trust anyone, so the betrayals he experiences just can't have a strong emotional impact. The film is constructed in such a way (by being essentially told from his point of view) that emotional depth is almost an impossibility. The "afflict the audience with Lenny's ailment" gambit is the film's greatest technical accomplishment, but it is also the technique which most prevents the film from having any real emotional power with the audience. Lenny has nothing to lose and therefore his actions never carry much emotional risk. Since the film puts us in Lenny's shoes, we never feel much emotional investment in the proceedings either.

It's why the story of Mrs. Jankis is by far the most poignant sub-plot in the film. She has lost something very dear to her -- critical to her, in fact, to the point where she doesn't want to live without it. She's emotionally invested, and so we feel the tragedy of her situation. Lenny's not emotionally invested in anything, and the filmmaker's last-minute attempt to transfer our sympathy from the Jankis family onto Lenny by implying that all the film's references to the Jankis couple might have actually been describing Lenny and his wife, is sabatoged by the wary distrust we've been taught to harbor during the film's two previous hours.

By contast, the one really promising sequence involving Lenny is the sequence in which he hires the call-girl to lay in the bed beside him until he falls asleep, and then wake him up by making a noise in the bathroom after littering the room with his wife's belongings. This is a model of subtlety and captures in a wordless, brilliant way, his desire to just wake up and not find the bed cold next to him -- to be able to believe, at least for a few minutes, that his wife is still with him and that his nightmare existence was just a dream. If the film had had more sequences like that, I'd be recommending it to everyone. As it is, though, the film strikes me as more of a shallow exercise in technique, designed to trick the viewer into mistaking confusion and artificial complexity for true meaning and depth. The film has plenty of confusion and complexity, but not much of it has any real significance beyond its own plot.

I do hope the filmmakers will try again, though. I'd rather see a dozen failed experiments of this type than any more empty Hollywood spectacles like Swordfish or Gladiator.

Other reviews by Ray Cole: [Movies] [Music]