Plenty of films have started by revealing their ending at the beginning before telling the majority of their story with one long chronological flashback, such as American Beauty and Fight Club.  Memento begins the same way, but tosses the notion of a sequential tale out the window almost immediately.  The film has a rather conventional story, but it's structured in such a unique way that it might take a while to wrap your mind around it. Once viewers get into Memento's groove, they'll be treated to one exceptionally fantastic cinematic ride.

Guy Pearce (Rules of Engagement) stars as Leonard Shelby, an insurance fraud investigator from San Francisco.  He drives a Jaguar, wears expensive suits and has fistfuls of cash, but chooses to live in a cheap roadside motel. Leonard also has a supply of Polaroid photographs of complete strangers and seems surprised to find, after taking off his shirt, that his entire torso is covered with tattoos that put Max Cady to shame.

The photos and tattoos, we learn, are there because Leonard has no short-term memory.  He can't remember anything that happened more than 15 minutes earlier, and his pictures reacquaint him with things like his car, his hotel room and the people he knows.  The tattoos, however, remind Leonard of something more disturbing.  It turns out that his wife Catherine (Jorja Fox, The West Wing) was raped and murdered, and the killer was never brought to justice.  Leonard took a blow to the head in the attack and, despite not being able to remember much since, has devoted his life to finding and executing his wife's killer.

What makes Memento exceptional is its labyrinthine construction. The film's scenes are played out backwards, so viewers are just as fact-deprived as Leonard.  When he meets Teddy (Joe Pantoliano, Ready to Rumble) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss, Chocolat) for the first time, Leonard doesn't have a clue who they are, and neither do we.  Teddy acts like a friend, but the Polaroid says not to trust him.  As Memento works its way backwards, Leonard, like the viewers, knows somebody is playing him, but he must constantly battle his failing memory as he attempts to assemble his jigsaw puzzle life.  The whole backward thing might sound gimmicky, but it works extremely well - redefining terms like "intricate thriller" and "broken time."

Clever and crafty, Memento was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, whose micro-budgeted film called Following was a huge hit on the 1998 film festival circuit.  The script, which is reminiscent of both Tom Tykwer's Wintersleepers and Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again, was based on a story Nolan's brother concocted on a drive from Chicago to Los Angeles.  Clearly on top of his game, Nolan does more than play his film in reverse, adding in black-and-white flashbacks of an insurance fraud case involving amnesia that Leonard worked on prior to Catherine's murder.  At first, the flashbacks seem out of place, but come together nicely at the end.  One of the film's lasting images is that of the development of an instant photograph shown in reverse - changing from a color picture to a solid gray square.

Memento, led by Pearce’s tour de force performance, marched through the awards ceremony at the Deauville Film Festival like Sherman through Georgia, and its eyes are set on prizes at the 2001 Sundance Fest.  It's the best Hitchcockian thriller since David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner, and the film's official site does a great job of keeping onlookers in the dark about the content of the movie.  If you want to check it out, it's www.otnemem.com (that's "memento" spelled backward).

1:53 –

for graphic violence, brief nudity, adult language and drug content