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It has however been remade three times already in the previous decade, a tamil version from 2005 called Ghajini (completely Bollywood style), a Bengali version from 2007 called Dhoka and a hindi version from 2008 also called Ghajini.
http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a1564/memento-mori-0301/
Thanks for sharing the link to the short story, @PropertyOfALady, a nice addition for discussion.
Im going to try and see if I can watch that 2008 remake to compare it against the orginal. Lets see if I can make it the whole way through
Thanks for that like @PropertyOfALady -- will take a look later today.
Reading the most recent comments/reviews, thought I'd be working solo on the prosecution of this first entry, @Legionnaire ;)
And I don't say that with relish, either. I was hoping to reassess this one in the positive. I've long regarded MEMENTO — and as I mentioned previously, it's been about ten years since I last saw it, and then only once — but I've regarded it since that initial viewing as Nolan's weakest.
At that time, I had been familiar with each of BATMAN BEGINS and THE PRESTIGE, and perhaps (depending on what year I saw MEMENTO) THE DARK KNIGHT. Having seen each of those others many times since, and taking into account each of INCEPTION, TDKR, INTERSTELLAR, and now DUNKIRK being more fresh in memory, I thought MEMENTO languishing at the back of the pack might be somewhat undeserved. So I was glad of being coaxed into another viewing.
Ultimately, though, it stays put at the rear. I fully appreciate Legionnaire's observation above that its cleverness is its problem. More precisely, I suppose, my problem particularly is that its structure is the most interesting thing about it.
A film with MEMENTO's central conceit is naturally enticing; it sounds good on paper. I even enjoy the idea that such a film exists, and moreover that it (and by implication its central conceit) has been widely enjoyed by so many. Nolan has somewhat built a reputation on making cerebral films that esteem an audience's intelligence, which is great. I love that a film like INCEPTION was as big a hit as it was. At times, however, I feel he's less willing to trust an audience as far as the deeper stuff goes; that is, he sometimes houses a film's cleverness in more surface-level machinations while handling motifs more heavy-handedly (i.e. characters openly talking about the themes of the film— the idea of love in INTERSTELLAR, for example — results in the film being 'all talk and no action'). Note that this is in a way a nitpick, because plenty of other filmmakers not only do it more than Nolan but also do it far more offensively, and his doing it in no way renders his films 'bad' — I mention it merely to point out that though he makes clever films, there is nevertheless a (common) superficiality to some parts of some of them.
Where I see this superficiality come into play with MEMENTO is the focus it takes on the central idea, which turns out in Nolan's practice (as opposed to on paper) to be much too overpowering.
Taking some other films that choose to tell their story in a non-linear fashion (not necessarily in reverse, mind you) like ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND or PULP FICTION or even DUNKIRK (definitely Nolan's best work in my book), I observe that the structure serves the story. With MEMENTO I'm left with a sense that story serves the structure, that is the central conceit dictated the story. Take the form away. If the film played out entirely linearly, would there be merit to it? (I recognize this is not entirely fair, because to re-order the narrative would create an experience that would not be the film. But what it would do is shake off the distraction of the structure to get a better look at the engine.)
The cleverness Nolan offers typically, as here with MEMENTO, is accompanied by an interactive element. The audience becomes engaged in the process of solving the film. MEMENTO could be said, at it core, to be a mystery, and all mysteries are of course interactive to a degree, inviting the viewer to piece the solution together. But I think MEMENTO stands in opposition to, say, something like LAURA or CHINATOWN. In the former the mystery becomes an overwhelming goal, but in each of the latter the mystery element of that film is one among several interesting elements. No one comes out of CHINATOWN talking about the process they went through trying to solve the mystery as they watched it, or even what the solution to the mystery turns out to be.
MEMENTO's narrative becomes goal-oriented, then, creating a sense that you are essentially watching the assembling of a puzzle in which the characters are not characters but pieces towards the end result. If that makes sense.
I'm sure it's possible to make a film where this all works, but I'm not sure Nolan's done it here. I'm sure to be in the minority on this one, and I'm not aiming to change minds, but I hope to have at least explained my stance cogently!
Hindi remake 2008
Anyway, I enjoyed watching it. The idea of telling the story backwards is, of course, effective in that it puts you in the protagonist's shoes; creates a radically different form of anticipation and interest in seeing the story develop (backwards, of course); and puts your mind at work to try to understand the mystery (personally, at times I found the new information I was learning about the story a tad too much to process). The actors are compelling, especially Pantoliano, who is all smiles but you just know from the beginning you can't trust the guy. The dreamy, synthesized music score fits the film very well; it seems to emphasize the general concept of the film --the strangeness of having your memories vanish-- instead of the mystery of the dead wife.
That, of course, leads me into what @Strog was saying: that "the story serves the structure." I agree with this, and also with that of the characters talking about the themes of the film (which is what Leonard does at the end). The subservience of story to structure makes me wonder how the movie will hold up in future viewings. The first time, the main focus is in trying to piece things together, but afterwards, what will there be? Without knowing for sure, I sense a lack in this respect. Does that potential lack of rewatchability make a film a lesser one, a fundamentally flawed one? I'm not sure, but right now I lean towards no. After all, hypothetically, a film could provide a fascinating, innovative experience, and even if that experience was one-time only, those qualities would make the film, and the experience, worthwile. In the case of Memento, the "experience" is putting you in the shoes of Leonard. That's not something you see every day. That has to count for something.
At any rate, there are still some interesting things if you look beyond the structure of the film. There is some humor along the way, in the scenes with Mark Boone Junior, and in the chase scene (who's chasing who?). The story with Stephen Tobolowsky is touching. But in fact, the most poignant moment for me comes at the very end. When Joe Pantoliano is searching for his keys, right there in the middle of nowhere, he comes across as so pathetic, especially when you know he is eventually going to meet his death. And of course, Leonard is also there, thinking he understands what's happening in his life but in fact being as clueless as usual. That strange situation these characters are stuck in is sad. I found that moving, in its own strange, twisted way.
Memento is definitely a special film: that much I'll say.
It's a chilling film in a way because we are put in Leonard's predicament and it's a nightmarish situation. Was never sure if the 'Sammy Jankis' story is really about someone Leonard is referring to or Leonard's real backstory.
Other ellements such as dialogue, acting, character arc etc etc are hardly discussed which is a shame. I think the structure is so unusual that much of the viewers brain power is used to follow this and its hard to enjoy the other ellements of the movie. Its very hard to appraise. It's also hard to really like (perhaps because of the effort). I respect it and like certain ellements but it lakes "rewatchability" I think. Once you have tried it, you dont really want to return.
What I wopuld say is that Pearce was/is a very fine actor with great screen presence. He could have been a massive star but selected a more eclectic set of roles. Top five "missed Bonds" IMHO
Such a fascinating film. A true original.
Serious spoiler here. youtu.be/56436ovEFYE
I found some of his thoughts related to ones posed here: @LeonardPine observation of the film's originality, @Thunderfinger observation of being firmly in the protagonist's shoes and knowing only as much as him, the lack of rewatchability noted by @patb etc.
Anyhow, I thought some excerpts from it might be of interest so far as our discussion. It's all totaled up to be somewhat lengthy, but I thought it was enlightening. For those skimming I've bolded some points I found particularly interesting. The whole essays worth a read if you can get hold of it.
--
"Why did narrative experimentation surge back in the 1990s? Our immedaite impulse—to look for some broad cultural change as the trigger—should be held in check long enough to consider more proximate causes. One factor was the off-Hollywood cinema that began to surface with films like Blue Velvet (1986) and She's Gotta Have It (1986). The boom in independent production had created a crowded field, and product differentiation was needed. Plot maneuvers could boost the standing of a low budget film with no stars. Pulp Fiction proved that tricky storytelling could be profitable, particularly if it offered a fresh take on genre ingredients."
[...]
"At the same time a generational shift was taking place. The new Hollywood had been raised on Old Hollywood and 1960s art movies, but the Newest Hollywood brought TV, comic-book, videogame, and pulp-fiction tastes to the movies and a free approach to narrative came along. The twists in The Sixth Sense (1999), The Game (1997), and Fight Club (1999) would not have been out of place in Rod Serling's Twilight Zone TV series...In harmony with their audience, the rising generation of directors grasped the narrative possibilities afforded by the home-video revolution. Thanks to videocassettes, fans could study clever plotting at length, and a director could drop in details apparent only in repeat viewings. By 2001 a critic could write of tracking Memento's backward structure, 'Oh will this ever be fun to do on DVD!'
"Filmmakers seeking models of daring storytelling didn't have to look far. Hollywood has long been a stylized filmmaking tradition, and Josef von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, and other directors put formal problems at the center of their work...Hitchcock is virtually the patron saint of young filmmakers who want to tinker with storytelling. Another central inspiration was Hollywood's 1940s-1950s experiements, particularly the noirs. 'For me,' notes Christopher Nolan, director of Memento (2001), "film noir is one of the only genres where the concept of point of view is accepted as a fairly important notion in the storytelling, and where it's totally accepted that you can flashback and flashforward and change points of view.'"
[...]
"Within the backward stream of action, Nolan deploys a host of cohesion devices [in Memento] to keep us oriented to the plot's progression. Scenes are linked by physical tokens: photos, facial scratches and bruises, a broken car window, a license plate, a motel room key, and a flurry of notes on pads, cups, coasters, and Leonard's flesh. Closure operates retrospectively, but the events still cohere through cause and effect. We see Leonard burn a book and a clock in one scene, and in the next scene the book and clock sit on a nightstand...At the end of one scene in color, Leonard sees "Remember Sammy Jankis" written on his wrist, and at the beginning of the next scene, a black-and-white one, he's on the phone in his motel explaining, "I met Sammy through work." In addition, Nolan has carefully repeated the closing and opening moments of most reverse-order scenes, often with the same shots and voice-over, so that when we return to that track we can recall where we left off...
"Nolan's real achievement, it seems to me, is to make his reverse-order plot conform to classical plot structure and film-noir twists. In the very first scene, our hero kills the mysterious Teddy and thus apparently achieves his goal. But if the Climax is settled at the start, where's the suspense? Soon the film shows that Leonard's true goal is to kill "John G," the burglar who purportedly raped and killed his wife...If story events had been presented in chronological order, Teddy would at the start have explained fully how he duped Leonard into killing Jimmy and others, providing us with all necessary exposition. In reverse order, however, Teddy's explanation serves as a climactic revelation, resolving many uncertainties.
[...]
"Memento is often considered a "puzzle film," and the emergence of this category in recent years testifies further to new Hollywood's pride in intricate narrative maneuvers. Viewers seem to apply the notion fairly broadly, invoking it whenever a film asks us to discuss "what really happened," to think back over what's been shown, or to rewatch the film in the seartch for clues to the key revelations...The narrative withholds information, often not signalling that it's doing so...Here our range of knowledge is confined principally to a single character, and the late-arriving information comes as the sort of surprise conventional in the mystery or detective genre...In such movies, the narration is likely to replay scenes at the Climax so as to put them in a new light; redundancy confirms the concealed premise. Intrigued viewers may rewatch the film to see how they were misled—typically, how the telling skipped over certain information.
[...]
"These puzzle films draw their strength from certain genres (mystery, horror, neo-noir) that feature self-conscious, ludic narration. We're expecting to be misled, and so we must be ready to have our expectations drastically revised. We're guided through the games of gap making and gap filling by genre conventions, the redundancy built into mainstream storytelling principles, and our familiarity with adjacent traditions: short stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Saki, and O. Henry as progenitors of the twist tale, art films as arenas of subjective/objective ambiguity. As the zone of indeterminacy widens, however, our reliance on classical closure wanes, and we must call on more rarefied comprehension skills to play with the ambiguities the films offer...In rare cases like Last Year at Marienbad (1961), the entire movie's action seems indeterminate, and then we lose all moorings. We can't be sure that any events or states of affairs count as veridical, and the narration is revealed as thoroughly unreliable. Completely indeterminate movies are rare in American cinema: Point Blank (1967) may count as one, and perhaps only David Lynch currently makes them.
[...]
[Flashbacks these days more often not being motivated by character memory or reconstruction] is a change from traditional practice, in which a framing situation would present a character recounting or reflecting on the past...Today the narration will often simply juxtapose one chunk of time with another, though still marking the flashback with an intertitle, a dialogue hook, or a vivid optical transition and burst of sounds. Now, it seems, audiences' familiarity with flashback structures allows filmmakers to delete the memory alibi and move straight between present and past. But Quentin Tarantino points out that rearranging blocks of time...is common in prose fiction:
"...Pulp Fiction (1994) offers somewhat purer instances of the chapter-division flashback, each labeled with an orienting title. Large blocks rather than mere interpolations, these flashbacks recall Richard Stark's four part noir novels, in which a first batch of chapters presents a suspenseful situation, the next sections backtrack to show what led to it, and the final part returns to the present for the climax.
"Tarantino's debt to pulp fiction reminds us that many storytelling innovations in contemporary American cinema have precedents in other popular media. To take an extreme case, it's tempting to think of Memento as a dumbed-down version of the retrograde plotting seen in Harold Pinter's 1978 play Betrayal and its film version (1983). Isn't a reverse-order structure something tolerated only in highbrow drama and art cinema? Actually, well before Memento hit the screens, a fall 1997 episode of Seinfeld ("The Betrayal") told its story in reverse. Back before Pinter, George F. Kaufman and Moss Hart employed the device in the 1934 Broadway play Merrily We Roll Along, [and] in the novel Goodbye to the Past (also 1934), W.R. Burnett moves the action from 1929 steadily back to 1873. Like Memento and Tarantino's films, all these works announce their deviant structure. The Seinfeld episode specifies days and times at the head of each scene; the text of Kaufman and Hart's play explains the device and lists the scenes' epochs; Goodbye to the Past takes as its epigram Kierkegaard's dictum "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Again, formal experiment demands overt prompting."
--
Some thoughts:
- Bordwell makes some good points about the influence of TV and video games encroaching into film narrative, alongside the rise in home media and what effect that had. Throughout, though, he pitches some part of the appeal of "puzzle movies" being their rewatchability. I agree with this. Taking SIXTH SENSE and FIGHT CLUB for example, I can see the appeal of rewatching with a new eye. But for some reason, and others have noted this so far as well, MEMENTO doesn't seem that rewatchable. If it is operating on the same principles, then why is that? Could it be that we don't have any need to see how we were 'misled,' having known from the start that the central gimmick was reverse chronology?
- The comparison of the work done by Tarantino and Lynch to MEMENTO is interesting. In my initial comments on MEMENTO I compared its non-linearity to PULP FICTION's but missed comparing it to any of Lynch's work. So: first, as mentioned in the essay, Lynch stands alongside Tarantino and Nolan as one of the filmmakers experimenting with narrative form around the same time. Second, Lynch, Nolan, and Tarantino are all very much interested in incorporating noir conventions as part of that narrative experimentation, noir being a genre (as noted by Nolan) that is inherently conducive to playing with time. Third, they each produced ostensible "puzzle" films. But as I noted, Tarantino's PULP FICTION makes the structure subservient to the story; I feel like MEMENTO does the opposite. And while something like Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE could be called a puzzle film, I'm not fully on board with that. If MEMENTO is solving the puzzle before my eyes, then MULHOLLAND DRIVE is holding up each puzzle piece in front of me before setting it back down and picking up the next, leaving the thing for me to assemble myself after the fact.
These are just my thoughts and questions. Feel free to respond to the essay excerpts if you found any enlightening.
Who is David Bordwell?
Also here is an interesting chart.
Got a lot to say but it's 3 AM in the morning and I'm exhausted and will try to form my crazy by the minute notes and theories on the film into a final mini essay that makes some form of sense.
In the hindi remake it is the same
But the tamils missed the point
Hence he looks extra confused when looking in the mirror.
Yes. Because after he finds each 'killer' he destroys all evidence of his 'clues' forgets about it just to start his search all over again. Leonard is using deliberate self delusion to carry on his never ending quest.
Yeah, I saw the quick cuts, one of Leonard playfully pinching his wife's leg especially, which confirm even more that Leonard is a very unreliable narrator.
Please do, old boy. I want to read your thoughts!
When I watched the picture, I spent almost ten minutes trying to pause on Leonard's hand tattoo. The one that says 'Remember Sammy Jankis'.
Fantastic gif! I freakin' love it.
I'm sorry to say I haven't had a chance to watch Memento yet. Been on vacation with the Mrs. so I haven't had quite the normal amount of free-time I normally have. I might have to do a double feature with La Notte and give me thoughts on both at the same time.