Memento (film)

Memento is a 2000 American psychological thriller film written and directed byChristopher Nolan, adapted from his younger brother Jonathan's short story "Memento Mori". It stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a man with anterograde amnesia which renders his brain unable to store new memories. During the opening credits, which portrays the end of the story, it is shown that Leonard kills Teddy (Joe Pantoliano). The film suggests that this killing is in vengeance for the rape and murder of his wife (Jorja Fox) based on information provided by Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss).

This film is often used to show the distinction between plot and story. The film's events unfold in two separate, alternating narratives — one in color, and the other in black and white. The black and white sections are told in chronological order, showing Leonard conversing with an anonymous phone caller in a motel room. Leonard's investigation is depicted in color sequences that are in reverse chronological order. As each sequence begins, the audience is unaware of the preceding events, just like Leonard, thereby giving the viewer a sense of his confusion. By the film's end when the two narratives converge we understand the investigation and the events that lead up to Teddy's death.

Memento premiered on September 5, 2000, at the Venice International Film Festival to critical acclaim and received a similar response when it was released in European theaters starting in October 2000. Critics especially praised its unique, nonlinear narrative structureand themes of memory, perception, grief, self-deception, and revenge. The film was successful at the box office and received numerous accolades, including Academy Awardnominations for Original Screenplay and Film Editing.

Plot

Memento is presented as two different sequences of scenes, a series in black-and-white that are shown chronologically, and a series of color sequences shown in reverse order. The two sequences "meet" at the end of the film, producing one common story.^[1] During the opening credits of the film, the only sequence to be played backwards is shown. It starts with the developed Polaroid photograph of a man shot in the head. As the sequence plays backwards we are shown the photo undeveloping, entering the camera, being taken, etc. As the credits end, we see the protagonist shoot a man in the head.

The movie starts in black-and-white with the protagonist, Leonard Shelby, in a motel room. Leonard has anterograde amnesia, impairing his ability to store memories of recent events. As Leonard explains in the film, his amnesia was a result of an attack by two men in his home. Leonard killed the attacker who raped and strangled his wife, but a second attacker clubbed him in the head and escaped. The police did not believe there was a second attacker, but Leonard has come to believe the attacker is a man known as "John G". During the black-and-white sequences, we learn about Leonard's amnesia through the story Leonard tells an unnamed caller about the strange case of Sammy Jankis. Leonard explains how he met Sammy during his job as an insurance investigator. Sammy appeared to have anterograde amnesia after a car accident, but since Sammy could not learn through conditioning, Leonard reported that Sammy's condition must be psychological rather than physical and, therefore, not covered. Leonard explains how Sammy's diabetic wife conducted her own experiment to try to test Sammy, repeatedly requesting her insulin injections in quick succession, hoping that Sammy would remember the previous injection. He didn't, and as a result, she fell into a coma, never recovering.

The color sequences, shown in reverse order starting with the opening murder, are about Leonard’s investigation using his system of notes, Polaroid photos, and tattoos, to track down "John G". Leonard gets a tattoo, based on instructions to himself, identifying "John G"'s license plate. Finding a note in his clothes, he meets Natalie, a bartender. Natalie, seeing Leonard wearing the clothes and driving the car of her boyfriend, Jimmy, is at first resentful towards Leonard. After understanding his condition, and using this to get Leonard to drive a dangerous man named Dodd out of town, Natalie offers to run the license plate on Leonard's latest tattoo to help his investigation. Meanwhile, Leonard encounters another man, Teddy, who acts as Leonard's friend, helping him deal with Dodd, but warns him about Natalie; however, Leonard notes that his writing on the Polaroid of Teddy tells himself not to trust the man. Natalie eventually provides Leonard the driver's license, which matches that of John Edward Gammell—Teddy—and conforms with the rest of Leonard's information on "John G" and his Polaroid warnings. Leonard meets Teddy and drives him to an abandoned building, killing him as shown in the opening credits.

The climax of the film starts in the final black-and-white sequence. Prompted by the caller in the motel room, Leonard meets Teddy outside his motel. Teddy explains he is an undercover officer and has been helping Leonard with his investigation. Teddy says he's found Leonard's "John G". (Jimmy Grantz, Natalie's boyfriend) and directs Leonard to an abandoned building outside of town—the same location where Leonard will eventually kill him—and when Jimmy arrives, Leonard strangles him. Leonard takes a photo of the body and as this photo develops, the black-and-white scene transitions to color and the color sequences of the film begin.

Leonard swaps clothes with Jimmy and, as he drags the body to the basement, he hears Jimmy whisper "Sammy", causing Leonard to doubt that he really is the second attacker. When Teddy arrives and continues to assert that Jimmy was the John G they've been looking for, Leonard refuses to trust him. Teddy admits that Jimmy was just a drug trafficker and that, together, they had already found and killed "the real John G" more than a year before. Teddy claims that Leonard has confused elements of his own life with that of Sammy, explaining that Sammy was a con artist who had no wife and that Leonard's own wife actually survived the attack and was herself diabetic and that it was Leonard's wife, not Mrs. Jankis, who died in an insulin overdose.

Teddy accuses Leonard of deliberately creating an unsolvable puzzle to give himself purpose. He points out that "John G" is a common-enough name that Leonard's search can go on indefinitely. He reveals that even he has a "John G" name. In a conscious deliberate decision, Leonard burns the photograph of Jimmy's body and writes down Teddy's license plate number as a "fact" to be tattooed on himself as the second attacker's plate number. Leonard throws Teddy's keys into a bush and drives off in Jimmy's car. The film ends with Leonard stopping in front of a tattoo parlor, ready to get the license plate tattoo that will lead to Teddy’s death.

[edit]Cast

• Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby
• Carrie-Anne Moss as Natalie
• Joe Pantoliano as Teddy (John Edward Gammell)
• Mark Boone Junior as Burt
• Russ Fega as Waiter
• Jorja Fox as Leonard's Wife
• Stephen Tobolowsky as Sammy (Samuel R. Jankis)
• Harriet Sansom Harris as Mrs. Jankis
• Thomas Lennon as Doctor
• Callum Keith Rennie as Dodd
• Kimberly Campbell as Blonde
• Marianne Muellerleile as Tattooist
• Larry Holden as Jimmy (James F. Grantz)

[edit]Film structure

Fabula/Story vs Sujet/Plot.

The sujet, or the presentation of the film, is structured with two timelines: one in color and one in black-and-white. The color sequences are alternated with black-and-white sequences. The latter are put together in the chronological order. The color ones, though shown forward (except for the very first one, which is shown in reverse) are ordered in reverse. Chronologically, the black-and-white sequences come first, the color sequences come next.

Using the numbering scheme suggested by Andy Klein in his article for Salon magazine^[1]who took numbers from 1 to 22 for the black-and-white sequences and letters A-V for the color ones the plotting of the film as presented is: Opening Credits (shown "backward"), 1, V, 2, U, 3, T, 4, S, ..., 22/A, Credits.

There is a smooth transition from the black-and-white sequence 22 to color sequence A and it occurs during the development of a Polaroid photograph.

The fabula of the film (the chronological order of the story) can be viewed as a "Hidden feature" on the 2-Disc Limited Edition Region 1 DVD^[2] and the 3-Disc special Edition Region2 DVD.^[3] In this special feature the chapters of the film are put together into the chronological order and is shown: Ending Credits (run in reverse), 1, 2, 3, ..., 22, A, B, ..., V, then the opening title runs "backward" to what was shown (the opening title sequence is run in reverse during the actual film, so it is shown forward in this version).

Stefano Ghislotti wrote an article in Film Anthology^[4] which discusses how Nolan provides the viewer with the clues necessary to decodesujet/plotline as we watch and help us understand the fabula/story from it.

[edit]Production

[edit]Development

In July 1996, brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan took a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, as Christopher was relocating his home to the West Coast. During the drive, Jonathan pitched the story for the film to his brother, who responded enthusiastically to the idea.^[5] After they arrived in Los Angeles, Jonathan left for Washington, D.C., to finish college. Christopher repeatedly asked Jonathan to send him a first draft, and after a few months, Jonathan complied.^[6] Two months later, Christopher came up with the idea to tell the film backwards, and began to work on the screenplay. Jonathan wrote the short story simultaneously, and the brothers continued to correspond, sending each other subsequent revisions of their respective works.^[7]

Jonathan's short story, titled "Memento Mori", is radically different from Christopher's film, although it maintains the same essential elements. In Jonathan's version, Leonard is instead named Earl and is a patient at a mental institution.^[8] As in the film, his wife was killed by an anonymous man, and during the attack on his wife, Earl lost his short-term memory. Like Leonard, Earl leaves notes to himself and has tattoos with information about the killer. However, in the short story, Earl convinces himself through his own written notes to escape the mental institution and murder his wife's killer. Unlike the film, there is no ambiguity that Earl finds and kills the anonymous man.^[8]

In July 1997, Christopher's girlfriend Emma Thomas showed his screenplay to Aaron Ryder, an executive for Newmarket Films. Ryder said the script was, "perhaps the most innovative script I had ever seen",^[9] and soon after, it was optioned by Newmarket and given a budget of $4.5 million.^[10] Pre-production lasted seven weeks, during which the main shooting location changed from Montreal, Canada to Los Angeles, California, to create a more realistic and noirish atmosphere for the film.^[11]

[edit]Casting

Brad Pitt was initially slated to play the lead role of Leonard. Pitt was interested in the part, but passed due to scheduling conflicts.^[12] Other considered actors include Aaron Eckhart and Thomas Jane, but the role went to Guy Pearce, who impressed Nolan the most. Pearce was chosen partly for his "lack of celebrity" (after Pitt passed on the film, they "decided to eschew the pursuit of A-list stars and make the film for less money by using an affordable quality actor"), and his enthusiasm for the role, evidenced by a personal phone call Pearce made to Nolan to discuss the part.^[13]

After being impressed by Carrie-Anne Moss' performance as Trinity in the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix, Jennifer Todd suggested her for the part of Natalie. While Mary McCormack lobbied for the role, Nolan decided to cast Moss as Natalie, saying, "She added an enormous amount to the role of Natalie that wasn't on the page".^[14] For the corrupt police officer Teddy, Moss suggested her co-star from The Matrix,Joe Pantoliano. Although there was a concern that Pantoliano might be too villainous for the part, he was still cast, and Nolan said he was surprised by the actor's subtlety in his performance.^[15]

The rest of the film's characters were quickly cast after the three main leads were established. Stephen Tobolowsky and Harriet Sansom Harris play Sammy Jankis and his wife, respectively. Mark Boone Junior landed the role of Burt, the motel clerk, because Jennifer Todd liked his "look and attitude" for the part (as a result he has re-appeared in minor roles in other productions by Nolan).^[16] Larry Holden plays Jimmy Grantz, a drug dealer and Natalie's boyfriend, while Callum Keith Rennie performs the part of Dodd, a thug to whom Jimmy owes money. Rounding out the cast is Jorja Fox as Leonard's wife and Kimberly Campbell as a prostitute.

[edit]Filming

Filming took place from September 7 to October 8, 1999,^[17] a 25-day shooting schedule. Pearce was on set every day during filming, although all three principal actors (including Pantoliano and Moss) only performed together the first day, shooting exterior sequences outside Natalie's house. All of Moss' scenes were completed in the first week,^[18] including follow-up scenes at Natalie's home, Ferdy's bar, and the restaurant where she meets Leonard for the final time.

Pantoliano returned to the set late in the second week to continue filming his scenes. On September 25, the crew shot the opening scene in which Leonard kills Teddy. Although the scene is in reverse motion, Nolan used forward-played sounds.^[19] For a shot of a shell casing flying upwards, the shell had to be dropped in front of the camera in forward motion, but it constantly rolled out of frame. Nolan was forced to blow the casing out of frame instead, but in the confusion, the crew shot it backwards.^[19] They then had to make an optical (a copy of the shot) and reverse the shot to make it go forward again. "That was the height of complexity in terms of the film", Nolan says. "An optical to make a backwards running shot forwards, and the forwards shot is a simulation of a backwards shot."^[20]

The next day, on September 26, Larry Holden returned to shoot the sequence where Leonard attacks Jimmy.^[21] After filming was completed five days later, Pearce's voice-overs were recorded. For the black-and-white scenes, Pearce was given free rein to improvise his narrative, allowing for a documentary feel.^[20]

The Travel Inn in Tujunga, California, was repainted and used as Leonard's and Dodd's motel rooms. Scenes in Sammy Jankis' house were shot in a suburban home close to Pasadena, while Natalie's house was located in Burbank.^[22] The crew planned to shoot the derelict building set (where Leonard kills Teddy and Jimmy) in a Spanish-styled brick building owned by a train company. However, one week before shooting began, the company placed several dozen train carriages outside the building, making the exterior unfilmable. Since the interior of the building had already been built as a set, a new location had to be found. An oil refinery near Long Beach was used instead, and the scene where Leonard burns his wife's possessions was filmed on the other side of the refinery.^[23]

[edit]Music

David Julyan composed the film's synthesized score. Julyan acknowledges several synthesized soundtracks that inspired him, such asVangelis' Blade Runner and Hans Zimmer's The Thin Red Line.^[24] While composing the score, Julyan created different, distinct sounds to differentiate between the color and black-and-white scenes: "brooding and classical" themes in the former, and "oppressive and rumbly noise" in the latter.^[25] Since he describes the entire score as "Leonard's theme", Julyan says, "The emotion I was aiming at with my music was yearning and loss. But a sense of loss you feel but at the same time you don't know what it is you have lost, a sense of being adrift."^[26]Initially, Nolan wanted to use Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" during the end credits, but he was unable to secure the rights.^[27] Instead,David Bowie's "Something in the Air" is used, although another of Radiohead's songs, an extended version of "Treefingers", is included on the film's soundtrack.^[28]

[edit]Releases

The film gained substantial word-of-mouth press from the film festival circuit. It premiered at the 2000 Venice International Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation, and afterwards played at Deauville American Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.^[29] With the publicity from these events, Memento did not have trouble finding foreign distributors, opening in more than 20 countries worldwide. Its promotion tour ended at the Sundance Film Festival, where it played in January 2001.^[30]

Finding American distributors proved more troublesome. Memento was screened for various studio heads (including Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein) in March 2000. Although most of the executives loved the film and praised Nolan's talent, all passed on distributing the picture, believing it was too confusing and would not attract a large audience.^[31] After famed independent film director Steven Soderbergh saw the film and learned it was not being distributed, he championed the film in interviews and public events,^[32] giving it even more publicity, although he did not secure a distributor. Newmarket, in a financially risky move, decided to distribute the film itself.^[31] After the first few weeks of distribution, Memento had reached more than 500 theaters and earned a domestic total of $25 million in its box-office run. The film's success was surprising to those who passed on the film, so much so that Weinstein realized his mistake and tried to buy the film from Newmarket.^[33]

[edit]Marketing

Jonathan Nolan designed the film's official website. As with the marketing strategy of The Blair Witch Project, the website was intended to provide further clues and hints to the story, while not providing any concrete information.^[34] After a short intro on the website, the viewer is shown a newspaper clipping detailing Leonard's murder of Teddy. Clicking on highlighted words in the article leads to more material describing the film, including Leonard's notes and photographs as well as police reports.^[35] The filmmakers employed another tactic by sending out Polaroid pictures to random people, depicting a bloody and shirtless Leonard pointing at an unmarked spot on his chest.^[36]Since Newmarket distributed the film themselves, Christopher Nolan edited the film's trailers himself.^[36] Sold to inexpensive cable-TVchannels like Bravo and A&E, and websites such as Yahoo and MSN, the trailers were key to the film gaining widespread public notice.

[edit]Home media

The Special Edition DVD's menus are arranged aspsychological tests. Highlighting certain objects will lead to special features.

Memento was released on DVD and VHS in the United States and Canada on September 4, 2001, and in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2002. The UK edition contains a hidden feature that allows the viewer to watch the film in chronological order. The Canadian version does not have this feature but the film chapters are set up to do this manually or through DVD programming. The original US release does not have the chronological feature nor are the chapters set up correctly to do it.

The film was later re-released in a limited edition DVD that features an audio commentary by Christopher Nolan, the original short story by Jonathan Nolan on which the film was based, and a Sundance Channel documentary on the making of the film.^[37] The limited edition DVD also contains a hidden feature that allows the viewer to watch the film in chronological order.^[38]

The Limited Edition DVD is uniquely packaged to look like Leonard's case file from a mental institution, with notes scribbled by "doctors" and Leonard on the inside.^[38] The DVD menus are designed as a series of psychological tests; the viewer has to choose certain words, objects, and multiple choice answers to play the movie or access special features.^[38] Leonard's "notes" on the DVD case offer clues to navigating the DVD.

Memento was re-released in the UK on a 3-disc Special Edition DVD on December 27, 2004. This release contains all the special features that are on the two US releases in one package plus a couple of new interviews. The menus appear as tattoos on a body and are more straightforward than the US 2-disc limited edition DVD.

Memento was released on Blu-ray Disc on August 15, 2006. This release lacks the special features contained on the Limited Edition DVD, but does include the audio commentary by director Christopher Nolan. The single-layer disc features an MPEG-2 1080p transfer and PCM 5.1 surround audio. The film was also released on iTunes as a digital download.

The re-release of the Blu-ray has been announced for release in the USA on 22 February 2011 by Lionsgate.^[39]

[edit]Reception

Memento was a box office success. During its opening weekend, it was released in only 11 theaters, but by week 11 it was distributed to more than 500 theaters.^[40] It grossed $25,544,867 in North America and $14,178,229 in other countries, making the film's total worldwide gross some $40 million as of August 2007.^[40] During its theatrical run, it did not place higher than eighth in the list of highest-grossing movies for a single weekend.^[41]

The film was nominated for Academy Awards in Original Screenplay and Editing, but did not win in either category.^[42] Because Jonathan Nolan's short story was not published before the film was released, it was nominated for Original Screenplay instead of Adapted Screenplay. It was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, but lost to The Believer. However, it won 13 awards for Best Screenplay and five awards for Best Picture from various film critic associations and festivals, including the Chicago Film Critics Associationand the Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.^[42] Christopher Nolan was nominated for three Best Director awards including theDirectors Guild of America Award and was awarded one from the Independent Spirit Awards. Guy Pearce was accorded Best Actor from theSan Diego Film Critics Society and the Las Vegas Film Critics Society.^[42]

[edit]Critical response

Memento was met with near universal critical acclaim, earning a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a website that aggregates professional critiques.^[43] Online film critic James Berardinelli gave the film four out of four stars, ranking it number one on his year-end Top Ten list and number sixty-three on his All-Time Top 100 films.^[44][45] In his review, he called it an "endlessly fascinating, wonderfully open-ended motion picture [that] will be remembered by many who see it as one of the best films of the year".^[46] Berardinelli praised the film's backwards narrative, saying that "what really distinguishes this film is its brilliant, innovative structure", and noted that Guy Pearce gives an "astounding...tight, and thoroughly convincing performance".^[46] In 2009, Berardinelli chose Memento as his #3 best movie of the decade. William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes that Memento is a "delicious one-time treat", and emphasizes that director Christopher Nolan "not only makes Memento work as a non-linear puzzle film, but as a tense, atmospheric thriller".^[47] Rob Blackwelder noted that "Nolan has a crackerjack command over the intricacies of this story. He makes every single element of the film a clue to the larger picture...as the story edges back toward the origins of [Leonard's] quest".^[48]

However, not all critics were impressed with the film's structure. Marjorie Baumgarten wrote, "In forward progression, the narrative would garner little interest, thus making the reverse storytelling a filmmaker's conceit."^[49] Sean Burns of the Philadelphia Weekly commented that "For all its formal wizardry, Memento is ultimately an ice-cold feat of intellectual gamesmanship. Once the visceral thrill of the puzzle structure begins to wear off, there's nothing left to hang onto. The film itself fades like one of Leonard's temporary memories".^[50] While Roger Ebert gave the film a favorable three out of four stars, he did not think it warranted multiple viewings. After watching Memento twice, he concluded that "Greater understanding helped on the plot level, but didn't enrich the viewing experience. Confusion is the state we are intended to be in".^[51] Jonathan Rosenbaum disliked the film, and commented in his review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind thatMemento is a "gimmicky and unpoetic counterfeit".^[52]

[edit]Scientific response

Many medical experts have cited Memento as one of the most realistic and accurate depictions of anterograde amnesia in any motion picture. Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch called Memento "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media,"^[53] while physician Esther M. Sternberg, Director of the Integrative Neural Immune Program at the National Institute of Mental Healthidentified the film as "close to a perfect exploration of the neurobiology of memory."^[54]

Sternberg concludes: "This thought-provoking thriller is the kind of movie that keeps reverberating in the viewer's mind, and each iteration makes one examine preconceived notions in a different light. Memento is a movie for anyone interested in the workings of memory and, indeed, in what it is that makes our own reality."

Clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale writes^[55] in Memories aren't made of this: amnesia at the movies: "The overwhelming majority of amnesic characters in films bear little relation to any neurological or psychiatric realities of memory loss... Apparently inspired partly by the neuropsychological studies of the famous patient HM (who developed severe anterograde memory impairment after neurosurgery to control his epileptic seizures) and the temporal lobe amnesic syndrome, the film documents the difficulties faced by Leonard, who develops a severe anterograde amnesia after an attack in which his wife is killed. Unlike in most films in this genre, this amnesic character retains his identity, has little retrograde amnesia, and shows several of the severe everyday memory difficulties associated with the disorder. The fragmented, almost mosaic quality to the sequence of scenes in the film also reflects the 'perpetual present' nature of the syndrome."

[edit]Lists of the best films

Year	Presenter	Title	Rank	Ref.
2009	The Onion A.V. Club	The Best Films of the '00s	5	[56]
2008	Empire	The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time	173	[57]
2005	Internet Movie Database (IMDb)	15th Anniversary Top 15 Films for the Last 15 Years	7	[58]
	Empire	The 50 Greatest Independent Films	13	[59]
2003	1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die		N/A	[60]
2001	National Board of Review (NBR)	Top 10 Films of the Year		[61]
	American Film Institute (AFI)			[62]

[edit]

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