I Didn't Really Like Memento

My feelings are hurt, but I won't remember

all spoiler warnings apply

          Well we've certainly started off this review from a contentious position, now haven't we. Memento (2000, Nolan) is widely critically acclaimed, and can almost be seen as a guide to the way the Nolan conceptualizes movies. When it first came out Ebert offered the movie three stars, remarking that it was "a diabolical and absorbing experience". I will even admit that I found the movie at least engaging on first viewing; I was riveted to each scene, awaiting the piece of information it would reveal, and how it would broaden the scope of our understanding. Of movies that have come out in the last twenty years, Memento is possibly the only film that has successfully told a story backwards. So why, amid the careful mechanisms of Nolan's screen play, and the committed performances of the supporting cast, do I not think particularly highly of Memento.
          A quick note on Memento if you've never seen the film, and you're going to want to go watch it before you read this review: Memento is the story of Leonard, a man incapable of forming new memories. The condition, as far as the audience can tell, is brought about by a blow to the head Leonard receives while attempting to save his wife from a rapist and, newly, murderer. The effect works in a manner of resetting; every few minutes Leonard's existence begins again, creating a new three minute lifetime.Memento's first scene is our protagonist standing over a body he has presumably just murdered, and works backwards from there.
          The performance on display by Guy Pearce seems an almost central flaw to my way of thinking, and that isn't necessarily Guy Pearce's fault; considering his performances in L.A confidential (1997, Hanson) and The Hurt Locker (2008, Bigelow). However here he presents something of a continuous flat affect, when he's not mourning for a wife whom the audience never meets. But even this single emotion that Leonard (Pearce) displays is shallow. In one scene we see Leonard mourn out loud concerning his wife's death, and his inability to find closure, while Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), whom he just had sex with, lays in his arms. Afterwards he walks downstairs and leaves a not for his next incarnation that Natalie will help him out of pity, and we see his depression for the shallow manipulation that it was. It's true that the twist at the end of Memento gives Leonard's flat shallowness meaning, suggesting that this has always been who this person is, even before the accident; but that doesn't make him engaging as a character. Even in Nightcrawler I had a morbid sense of companionship for Louis bloom, but in Memento I'm engaged by the plot twists rather than the people within it.

           It's important to mention that the supporting cast could almost carry this movie on their own. Both Carrie-Anne Moss as a borderline psychopathic bartender, and Joe Pantoliano as Teddy, an equally manipulative cop, put in great work. Where I found Moss to be excessively Bland in the Matrix , here she was layered, peeling back kindness to reveal manipulation and careful calculation. Joe Pantoliano does masterful work with a character the script writers have filled in rather schizophrenically, managing to find an eerie place between annoyingly needy friend, and dangerous pursuer. Pantoliano, his motives revealed in full early in the film, almost feeds on Leonard's malleability.

Major spoilers ahead

          But movies like The Matrix prove that, given a strong enough story, mediocre acting won't necessarily drag down the experience of a movie; and Nolan's movies tend to hinge on mechanics. But Memento feels relatively hollow, despite its clever play with time, and the delicate unfolding of the facts. Here I would fault Nolan's focus on mechanics rather than emotional content and context. We begin the movie believing, as Leonard does, that he is attempting to avenge the rape and murder of his wife. When it is revealed that this entire idea was made up by Leonard to cope with the reality that his wife's eventual death was at his own hands; by accident when she attempted to test the validity of his condition. It also becomes apparent that Leonard has, by this point, murdered two relatively innocent men. Yet his reaction to this whole confounding discovery is to plot the murder of Teddy, whom he discovers engineered the situations of these murders. It's an almost baffling reaction at the very end of the film. Worse even than following up his murders with more murder, Leonard seems to feel nothing tangible concerning the events; he experiences no remorse, no guilt, no overwhelming sadness. All Leonard does is give himself something to do in the next incarnation, a new person to murder.

Notice how my faces in this movie all look somewhat similar?
I haven't, I'm busy staring questioningly into the mid ground

          It's here that I would like to digress from my main arc to point out a few plot holes which are large enough to transport several cargo ships through with comfortable room for a few dinghies. The first is that Leonard claims to not be able to form new memories past the event of his concussion, save those things he learns as habit, yet is entirely aware of his own condition; almost as if he had had it explained to him by a medical professional. This fuzziness of memory exists not only after his accident, but seems to extend to plot relevant events beforehand. Leonardy creates false memories about past events concerning a man named named Sammy, based on events that happened well after the event. The temporal relationships and consistency of memory is so fluid as to be almost meaningless. The second major plot hole is that the duration of each memory relapse is entirely inconsistent. Leonard claims, early on, that his memory will fade of how a conversation started, should it last too long, but seems capable of driving fair distances without resetting. He even has sex at one point, stopping to monologue afterwards; presumably at least taking ten minutes. Nor does the nature or severity of an event determine Leonard's ability to recall; his memory even resets during the middle of a gunfight. The sheer amount of information that Leonard would have to take in each relapse quickly becomes a burden to absorb in even a day's time. The final plot hole comes in the form of metadata, something of which Leonard has an absurd amount. A good chunk of the exposition is done by Leonard's phone call with what he believes is a police officer, in which he describes how he copes with the condition. It makes sense that Leonard could learn habitually, but how would he have learned that he was learning habitually. How would he know that he had established a system? To surmise: the nature of Leonard's memory is more plot device than it is condition; filling in the corners of events, cutting scenes where dramatically popular. 

          

Leonard's face after he murdered the first man he suspected of killing his wife
not exactly what I'd expect as an emotion, but alright

           But let me step back from my stream of nitpicking to pay the movie a few completely earned compliments. The score, written by David Julyan (Insomnia, The Prestige, Cabin in the woods), focuses on maintaining tension through repetition. Anxious and mechanical, clicks, piano notes, and wavering strings ring in the background. Yet the whole score is so well designed that it does not intrude upon the conscious experience of the movie, only informs.
           For all the plot-wobbliness, for all the vapidness of the main character, the film really is enjoyable to watch. Scenes are often played multiple times, each incident revealing a new aspect or meaning, Sometimes the scene will be newly informed the the one temporally previous, and sometimes by what new knowledge the viewers have gained about the players. I was as confused as Leonard was to begin with, but my journey was one of departure from Leonard. Initially his path seems righteous, but by the end we see something despicable in him. At the beginning we believe Leonard's words about having a system that allows him to live, but by the end we have realized his purpose is violent, created only for its own sake. His vaunted investigative capabilities, and resistance to manipulation, spoken at first in complete confidence, quickly become jokes as we see Leonard being toyed with.
          The aesthetic and cinematography remain relatively tight. The sets continuously feel empty, drained of life as Leonard is. Even the scene set in the breakfast joint, populated by several families eating breakfast, lacks a sense of movement, animation; they fade into the background. washed out blues and yellows dominate the screen. The entire film feels old and warn, yet has no reference to a living world.
            So do I think Memento is a bad movie? Hardly. The cinematography is engaging, the writing is tight, the dialogue is clever, and well written, if not entirely human seeming. It's not something I particularly enjoy re-watching though, and therein lies its fatal flaw. The movie is gripping on its first viewing, but much like a night of drinking it begins to fall apart upon the next morning.

Nolan uses black and white to signify the a scene is a memory.... but only some of the time

Nightcrawler

Tammas Hicks, 2,28,2015


          There has been a lot of comparison in the review bloggosphere between Nightcrawler (Gilroy, 2014), and Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976). Parallels have been drawn between the psychopathy of Nightcrawler's Louis Bloom (Gyllenhaal) and Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle (Deniro); and in a sense they are the similar men. Both are incapable of human connection while being simultaneously lonely, both have an obsession with violence that mixes with their delusions of grandeur, and both have a visible hunger that drives them into greater and greater lengths of madness. But where Taxi Driver spends its time revealing the illness that underlies Bickle's outward charm, Nightcrawler's lens seems obsessed with avoiding the evil that reaches out at the audience almost constantly from Bloom.

          The movie opens on Bloom stealing chain-link fence to sell at a scrap yard, only to be confronted by a night guard. The camera, revealing perhaps of the film's closeness to Bloom, focuses briefly on the night guard's watch. Later, when Bloom is at the scrap yard, after beating the guard unconscious, attempting to sell copper wire and chain link to an unimpressed general manager, we see him wearing the guard's watch. Bloom asks the manager for a job, pushing past obvious dislike, only to be rejected; but immediately he returns to his superficial politeness. Driving home from his encounter Bloom comes across a Night Crew videotaping the wreckage of a car crash, while police attempt to pull a body from the burning car, and is immediately obsessed. He steals a bike the next day and attempts to sell it to a similarly unimpressed pawn shop owner for twice what the owner is offering; only to end up settling for a camera and a police scanner.

          Therein lies the essence of Nightcrawler: The juxtapostion of Bloom's heroic self image, and the almost universal distaste that the world holds for him. Much like the grease in Bloom's hair, his oiliness sits like a sheen atop the entire film. When he introduces himself to potential coworkers his large and toothy smile seems forced, provoking a recoil. When Bloom tries to display his own intelligence he references read material, or online courses, sounding more of regurgitation than comprehension. The entirety of his character, outside of the hunger that drives him, consists of someone attempting to imitate human beings who neither truly understands them, nor cares to. Special credit must be given to the score, which seemed to reveal more about Bloom's opinion of the moment than the audience's. There was a particularly disturbing moment about midway through the film in which he blackmails a female coworker into a sexual relationship, while in the background the music is swooping and lilting as if this is our hero's romantic moment.

          This is, however, something of a weakness in an otherwise outstanding movie. The script occasionally pushes too hard, or the music seems too at odds with the moment, or both Bloom and the news station get away with actions which would fly by no police department. These are the moments when the movie slips from character study into satire, and are its least entertaining. Whether the movie is harping on the evil's of fear based new's coverage, or replaying the same bloody shot of Bloom watering a plant for which he does not actually care, it is significantly less entertaining than watching Bloom break into homes, or manipulate those around him. But these are hard raisins in what is an otherwise delicious fruitcake.

          At the end of the film, with a competitor dead, his former assistant dead, having escaped charges of manslaughter, Bloom stands in front of his three new vans, and matching new employees to give a speech. Bloom closes with the words "And remember, I wouldn't ask you to do anything that I wouldn't do". By this point the audience knows exactly where that boundary lies, and how far out from human decency it sits.