Depending on whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist and if you think Christopher Nolan (Inception, The Dark Knight) is one of the best directors working today, you’ll either see Memento as a well told Film Noir or a gimmicky mystery hinged on a few cheap tricks. You could choose one or the other, but I’d encourage you to accept them simultaneously. Certainly telling a story backwards in segments is an interesting storytelling trick that helps Christopher Nolan hide the twist ending’s significance, but it also helps the second gimmick, a protagonist incapable of creating new memories, take hold. If you can get past that (or if it was never an issue for you), you’ll find Memento is a well-crafted Noir and it leaves no doubt that Nolan knows how to manipulate narrative devices in creative, innovative ways.
Leonard (Guy Pearce) lost his wife and he’s looking for the man responsible. He has an extensive list of details that will lead him to her killer, but he can’t remember them. Not a single one; which accounts for the self-made tattoos all over his body, each of which outlines a quality of the killer he’s searching for. Leonard is incapable of creating new memories, a condition called anterograde amnesia, and keeps his motivation going strong by remembering the case of Sammy Jenkus (Stephen Tobolowsky), a man with the same condition that he investigated as an insurance claims adjuster before the night of the murder that left him with the brain trauma. Helping him in his search are Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), both of whom are aware of Leonard’s condition and thus have questionable motives. If this was all Memento was, an anterograde amnesiac searching for his wife’s killer, the film wouldn’t be nearly as academically interesting as it is.
The factor that pushes Memento over the edge, from just being a Film Noir with gimmicks, is how Nolan unravels the story. He does it in reverse, letting the audience share in Leonard’s constant state of temporal disconnect. One second he’s having a conversation with Teddy, and then time jumps backwards a little further, revealing each time how Leonard wound up where we started the time before. There are many ways to tell this story, though none of the other options would be quite as successful in helping the audience experience it in a way similar to Leonard as Nolan did it here; by not using just one of the two narrative devices they cease to be gimmicks and become complementary necessities towards embracing the condition of Leonard.
The aesthetic of Memento is gritty film combined with some oversaturation, which might be the only reason the Blu-ray transfer is worthwhile. The picture looks stunning at times and the audio elements of the film go a long way towards creating the feel, and they too shine in the hi-def transfer. The video and audio make for worthwhile reasons to forsake your DVD copy.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
There’s a bevy of extras here, though none of them are unique to the Blu-ray release, and most (if not all) of them will be repeats if you purchased the two-disc Limited Edition DVD released back in 2002. But if you didn’t, if you bought the barebones single disc edition, then some of this will be new to you. As it is, you have the Christopher Nolan audio commentary, a retrospective look at Memento, a film school-worthy exploration of some of Memento’s key scenes, a copy of Jonathan Nolan’s story “Memento Mori” which inspired the film, the IFC interview footage with Christopher Nolan (no more revealing than the commentary), and two photo galleries of sorts that have pages of Leonard’s journal and sketches of Leonard’s tattoos.
Again, if you’ve previously purchased the two-disc Limited Edition, this is essentially a double dip where all you’re getting is the bump in video and audio quality. It’s up to you to decide if the DVD upscaling on your Blu-ray player isn’t enough and you require that full 1080p glory of hi-def. For most people, I think the upscaling will be enough. But if you don’t have the Limited Edition version on DVD, the extras and the resolution combined make for a pretty powerful incentive to update.
"Memento - 10th Anniversary Edition" is on sale November 30, -0001 and is rated .
