Memento (2000)

USA, 113 minutes
Director/writer: Christopher Nolan
Photography: Wally Pfister
Cast: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

I often find discussions of film noir a little frustrating because I'm never sure what exactly are the terms of consensus—noir would appear to be something less than a genre and yet something more than a style. In the end perhaps it's best thought of as one of those things, like the way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography in 1964, that we know when we see. Thus, if one can forgive Memento for being filmed in color (mostly) and for being made outside of the time period 1945-1959, I'd like to just go ahead and submit it as one of the better examples of film noir around. Certainly the five main points that Wikipedia tells us the French critics rely on are present in sufficient quantity and quality, bullet-pointed for easy consideration: oneiric (that means dreamlike), strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. It's also preoccupied with crime and the criminal underworld, another typical feature. The utterly ingenious narrative strategy does set it apart from much that most of us have seen before —rhythmic bite-size pieces that move sequentially backward through time, alternating with slowly clarifying flashback interludes (shot in a gauzy black and white). It's essentially the point of view of our hero, Leonard, who has suffered since the murder of his wife from a condition of chronic short-term memory loss—he can't remember people he has met or things that have happened even an hour earlier. In spite of this, Leonard has set himself to finding his wife's killer, making endless notes to himself, even tattooing himself, to keep the facts of the case as intact in his mind as possible. But the shadowy figures in his life (even including himself, eventually) find it child's play to manipulate and cruelly use him. Watching movies is very often a kind of dreaming, but I've seen few that come as close to the experience of the dreams we have at night (outside of David Lynch, a discussion for another time). (I should note, as long as I'm inside these parentheses, that noir has seen other experiments in shuffling up time sequences, such as Kubrick's The Killing, and also that another famous noir, The Big Sleep, demonstrated it's not critically important to understand every point of a plot as it unfolds, or even for that plot to cohere.) Indeed, Memento is often baffling the first time through even as the kinetics keep one in thrall. Upon closer examination, however, it does all pretty much fits together, which ultimately produces an experience both overwhelming and unsettling, and deeply undermining of surprising depths of psychic certainty. In fact, every time I see it still I seem to take more away from it and come away more impressed—with the movie, not human beings. And if that's not noir, I don't know what is.