Memento (2001) Review

rating: *****

the story: Guy with memory issues tracks down clues to his wife’s killer.

review: Yeah, I was one of those people who got caught up in Christopher Nolan thanks to Memento, that movie with the apparently gimmicky backwards narrative. I watched his debut feature, Following, which is on the whole fairly similar (an ending that rewrites the whole story), which confirmed for me what I thought of Nolan’s filmmaking. I didn’t actually catch his third movie, Insomnia, until a few years after it was released. I caught back up with him thanks to Batman. I actually thought the other magician rivalry movie from 2006, The Illusionist, was better, even though I enjoyed The Prestige. It wasn’t until Inception (okay, The Dark Knight, which gave me whole new reasons to appreciate Nolan and replaced Memento as my favorite Nolan) that I saw him as truly capable of living up to the promise of Memento as I originally understood his talent.

So I thought pretty highly of it. But it’s not necessarily a movie I went out of my way, in the next twenty years, to revisit.

So watching it again, especially with those additional years and all the subsequent Nolan projects, was quite interesting. I ended up viewing its achievement differently.

It’s actually thanks to his most recent effort, Tenet. A lot of observers think Tenet was basically vastly overhyped. It was an especially strange year, 2020, and Nolan positioned Tenet to carry a lot of weight. A lot of people thought it would be Nolan’s first film to live up to Inception, which is to say it seemed to be so similar, at least as far as its premise looked. But then people actually saw it and they ended up thinking, that backwards time thing, it looked a lot like Memento.

Which is nonsense. The link between them, meanwhile, is real, but also very different than people imagine. Tenet is basically a story about threat prevention. It’s a complicated way to explore what it’s like to stop a tragedy before it happens. So it’s “about” time travel, which in this version looks like time running backwards.

So Memento, from this vantage point, looks different, too. Watching it again, I see it very differently. Maybe I just understand it better now. The whole story is a parable of using, or more accurately misusing, facts.

It’s an interesting thing to think about. We live in an age fraught with the application of facts: facts versus lies, facts as a totem of truth, of moral rectitude. But facts can be unreliable. Facts can in fact be lies. It’s in how they’re reached and how they’re applied that they become, well, dangerous.

And Nolan’s whole story, the way it unfolds, is a perfect testament to that. It doesn’t hurt that he tells it so well, that he has a cast so perfect to purpose, actors who seemingly could never top their roles in it, despite being so interesting: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano. I’ll give you a minute. Tell me one thing any of them did later that was nearly as magnetic. 

Yeah, didn’t think you could. Usually that’s what happens with actors in blockbusters. Later, when Nolan exclusively made blockbusters, he could afford to access actors whose careers were well-established, could pull away from his remarkable gravity, even conjure entire careers from it (Tom Hardy, the true miracle of Inception). Here at the beginning, it was a special kind of privilege to be trapped by it. Because they inhabit the truest form of classic.

This isn’t just a movie with a clever framework, it’s one that exhibits complete command of itself. That’s what defines the potential for greatness, if not greatness itself, why everyone still talks about Christopher Nolan, even if Memento itself seems somehow forgotten. It shouldn’t. If Nolan himself abandoned the relative small scale it represents for an endless series of grand visions, none of them would have been possible without Memento, quite literally. This is the portrait of an artist discovering the canvas. And filling it. And preparing to make that canvas even bigger, in the future. Same talent, different scale. 

You cannot appreciate Nolan, or the art of film itself, without due appreciation of Memento.

The Fugitive

***

directed by: Andrew Davis

starring: Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, Sela Ward, Joe Pantoliano, Andreas Katsulas, Julianne Moore

Released in 1993.

Based on the classic '60s TV series that famously drew huge ratings to finally catch the "one-armed man" who killed Richard Kimble's wife, The Fugitive is best known today as a classic '90s thriller, one of several such blockbusters to star Harrison Ford.  It also helped launch the popular career of Tommy Lee Jones.  In fact, it's the rare moment where the intended star and in fact title character might be said to have the movie stolen from out of under him.  Jones was so popular (he earned a Supporting Actor Oscar) that he earned a spin-off, U.S. Marshals, which was pointedly far more about his character than another fugitive like Kimble.

The Fugitive, like the Humphrey Bogart Maltese Falcon, is a classic example of Hollywood managing to buck the apparent rule that remakes can't at least match the original (Cecil B. DeMille accomplished this himself with the remake of his own The Ten Commandments, with the later Charlton Heston version becoming the one perennially broadcast at Easter).  If it hasn't already, the movie will eventually replace the legacy of the series.

That's the strength of the basic archetype.  This kind of story is told all the time on TV, usually within a single episode.  The original series was a rare instance of a single plot sustaining a continuing arc, something far more common in the modern era.  It'd be like Prison Break being made into a movie.  The pursuit really is a give-and-take between the sequences, Jones convincing us that his duty is the only thing that matters and Ford helping us believe that he's innocent.

None of it is very deep, but it's iconic.  Now that it's been told twice you can just as easily imagine someone else doing the story again, and maybe finding something a little greater in it.  The strength of this version will always be what it always was, Ford and Jones, but even Jones has since become ubiquitous that The Fugitive alone isn't completely necessary to keep his legacy intact.

But just for the record, it's a heck of a ride while it lasts.