Memento

Posted as part of Bryce Wilson’s Christopher Nolan blogathon at Things That Don’t Suck

‘Memento’ is a feature-length extrapolation of a 5,000 word story (‘Memento Mori’) by the director’s brother, Jonathan. The film adheres to basic premise of the short story – a man with short term memory loss tries to track down the man who raped and murdered his wife – and makes brilliant use of its key imagery: post-it notes, snapshots, tattoos, anonymous rooms. In the film, anti-hero Leonard (Guy Pearce) moves between a series of cheap motel rooms. The story mires him in the antiseptic confines of a hospital room. He’s called Earl in the story.

‘Memento Mori’ is structured so that it unfolds as a dialogue between Earl and his subconscious, his need for revenge/closure fighting its way through the vacuum that his memory has become. Every ten minutes – half an hour at the most – he’s back to a cognitive ground zero. He relies on prompts: lists, reminders, pictures. The post-it notes are handy. Over time, he’s built up a file; worked towards identifying the perpetrator. This kind of information needs more than post-it notes. He has himself tattooed. He’s called Earl in the story. There’s no Sammy Jankis.

‘Memento’ sets itself a difficult task. Cinema is above all a visual medium. The story is entirely internalised. The stages by which Earl arrives at an identification of his wife’s murderer are just so many blind spots. The settling of accounts at the conclusion is presented as the punchline to an elaborately established and cruelly ironic joke. At ten pages, it’s a small jewel of deliciously deceptive storytelling: it’s a character study whose protagonist is characterless; a revenge thriller stripped of thrilleramics or catharsis; a short story with sod all in the way of story.

‘Memento Mori’ has no Sammy Jankis. It has no Teddy Gemmell, either. There’s a tattooist in one brief scene, and a man lying dead on the pavement at the end. It’s fair to say that Earl is the only character; the story takes place in the blank spaces of his mind. Its tone and structure probe Earl, dispassionately and at one remove, like a lab specimen. He’s called Leonard in the film. Sammy Jankis (Stephen Toblowsky) is an alter ego of sorts, a man whose condition parallels his own; a man who, like Leonard, loses somebody close to him. Sammy is a constant reminder to Leonard. A reminder of who he is and why he is. A reminder, also, of guilt. Teddy Gemmell (Joe Pantoliano) is just as inextricably a part of Leonard. In the pas-de-deux of protagonist and antagonist, Leonard and Teddy share the same co-dependency (a constant theme in Nolan’s work which Bryce has highlighted during this blogathon) as cop and killer in ‘Insomnia’, Angier and Borden in ‘The Prestige’, Batman and The Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’.

‘Memento’ has Sammy and Teddy because otherwise Leonard would have no life, no persona, no point of identification or empathy audience-wise. Without Sammy and Teddy, Leonard would be a black hole into which everything would disappear, from Wally Pfister’s washed-out and atmospheric cinematography to the structural legerdemain of Christopher Nolan’s script. There would be no emotional charge to Leonard’s dalliance with a hooker (nothing sexual involved; he just wants to wake up to a few seconds’ false hope) or the scene where he burns some of his wife’s possessions (in coolly cynical voiceover he muses “I must have burned truckloads of this stuff”; a horrible admission that the act is purely symbolic and he’s no closer to acceptance, still unable to move on).

‘Memento Mori’ keeps its narrative beats offstage; likewise the genre tropes. Earl has a file on the killer; that’s all Jonathan Nolan really tells us. The film has neo noir written all over it. Drug dealers, duplicitous dames, questionable cops, guys with guns. Clues and connections. A join-the-dots hard-boiled narrative. In reverse. It’s like T.S. Eliot, having penned “in my beginning is my end”, thought fuck it and abandoned the ‘Four Quartets’ to write crime thriller. Jonathan Nolan’s story uses the cadences and careful repetitions of poetry to get into Earl’s head and describe the empty spaces and strange half-echoes of lost memories. He’s called Leonard in the film.

‘Memento’ is a feature-length extrapolation of a 5,000 word story by the director’s brother. In its end is its beginning.

Bound

Released from prison after a five stretch for the "redistribution of wealth", Corky (Gina Gershon) lands a bum job fixing up an apartment in a mob-owned tenement block. The people next door are Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) and his moll Violet (Jennifer Tilly). Caesar works for Gino Marzzone (Richard C Sarafian) and as such has to endure being partnered with Gino's viciously unpredictable son Johnnie (Christopher Meloni).

Violet, tired of all the macho bullshit and her designated role as trophy girlfriend/plaything, is immediately attracted to resilient, tough-talking Corky and the pair soon begin a clandestine relationship. But the secrecy only complicates Violet's life. She wants out; away from Caesar and his cronies; a new start in life.

When Caesar and Johnnie recover $2million in misappropriated funds from light-fingered mob accountant Shelly (Barry Kivel) and the currency is left in Caesar's safekeeping pending Gino's arrival from out of town to collect it, Violet and Corky hit upon a plan to swipe the cash and have Caesar take the fall.
At a cursory glance, I'd say pretty much all the requirements for an old-school crime caper are present and accounted for: a suitcase full of cash, an elaborate sting, an unexpected development that sends the carefully delineated plan spinning into freefall, a duped and vengeful loser, a corpulent mob boss, a loose-cannon wiseguy and a husky femme fatale. One who just happens to like other women.

This is the central conceit of 'Bound' - the machismo of the genre given a fresh spin by the elevation to protagonist of not just the gangster's moll but her lesbian lover - and might easily have been its failing. With its catalogue of shoot-outs, profane verbal stand offs, heads slammed against bathroom fixings and fingers snipped off with secateurs, 'Bound' has its share of exploitative elements. In the hands of many directors - especially, as here, two male co-directors - the romantic element could have been an exploitation scene too far, a bit of steamy soft-focus girl/girl action between the beatings and the gunplay.

Kudos to the brothers Wachowski, then, that they took Violet and Corky seriously as characters, and treated their relationship seriously as well. Don't get me wrong, the big sex scene in 'Bound' is steamy - but it's erotic in the proper sense, a culmination of the attraction and flirtation between Violet and Corky that hasn't so much simmered as ignited into flame and melted the celluloid during the first quarter of the film. Kudos again to the Wachowskis for retaining feminist and sex education expert Susie Bright as a consultant (she cameos in a bar room scene). The imagery and symbolism of the early scenes (most notably in Violet and Corky's first conversation) emphasise the feminine. I'd be willing to bet, if 'Bound' weren't so plot-driven and firmly pigeonholed as a crime movie (and, perhaps, if the Wachowskis hadn't gone onto create the beefed up mythology of the 'Matrix' trilogy and the day-glo vapidity of 'Speed Racer', that critics would be quick to tag the film as pro-feminist.

Umm, actually that's wrong. Andy and Larry Wachowski had already created 'The Matrix' ... well, they'd written the script for the first film anyway. 'Bound' was conceived as a stepping-stone, a low-budget debut that would prove they were capable of making the leap from writers (their original screenplay 'Assassins' had, albeit in a much mucked about with version, been filmed) to directors. Their aim was to instill enough confidence in the money men that 'The Matrix' would go into production with them at the helm.

A film, in other words, that got made purely so they could get another film made. And five films into their career it remains the best thing they've done.