There are common elements in many of Christopher Nolan’s films: the presence of Cillian Murphy, a Hans Zimmer score, and visual spectacle best seen on IMAX. But the element that repeats itself the most is Nolan’s obsession with time as both a storytelling device and filmmaking trick. That fixation began with his 2001 breakthrough film Memento, which Nolan wrote and directed. Released 25 years ago on March 16, 2001, Memento remains the key to understanding the techniques and themes Nolan has explored throughout his career.
Memento opens with a sequence played in reverse: a Polaroid photo of a dead man fading and then retracting into the camera, while his blood and the killing bullet flow backwards. It’s a jarring technique Nolan would later make central to his 2020 time-bending thriller Tenet. Then Memento gets even weirder.
The movie features two distinct sequences, reminiscent of the three plotlines moving at different speeds in Nolan’s 2017 World War II epic, Dunkirk. Before Nolan divided Oppenheimer into black-and-white and color to distinguish between the objective and subjective parts of his 2023 biopic, he used different color schemes to show the direction time was flowing in Memento.
The black-and-white scenes show Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) sitting in a hotel room and explaining his condition to an unknown character over the phone. Leonard has anterograde amnesia, which means he can’t form new memories. Those scenes move forward in time, while everything in color is a series of short sequences shown in reverse order. They follow Leonard’s quest to find John G., the man who murdered his wife and caused his brain injury.
Watching Memento for the first time is a surreal experience because the effect perpetually precedes the cause. The film begins with Leonard killing Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), who tries to explain that Leonard is making a mistake and that he knows more about the situation than Leonard does. As the rest of the story unfolds, it’s clear everyone around Leonard is using him for their own purposes. Sometimes the manipulations are petty and funny — the hotel’s manager has rented him an extra room because he knows Leonard won’t remember the transactions. But a man who can’t remember his own crimes and is driven by an obsessive sense of justice also makes the perfect killer.
Nolan’s name has become synonymous with big-budget epics, but Memento is an extremely lean movie shot entirely in shabby locations like motels, an abandoned building, and a dive bar that doubles as a drug front. Those locales provide a sharp juxtaposition to a series of flashbacks in the black-and-white section that reveal Leonard’s life before his amnesia-inducing injury.
We see Leonard as an insurance investigator working on the case of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a man who also has anterograde amnesia. The mix of clean office spaces and cozy home scenes feels very far from the world Leonard now inhabits. Leonard explains that while Sammy couldn’t function with his condition, Leonard can keep track of everything through his notes and tattoos. It’s clear that Leonard’s system isn’t really working given how many times he finds himself entirely confused by his circumstances. One hilarious scene starts with him running, and he has to quickly figure out if he’s chasing someone or being chased. But even though Leonard is obviously an unreliable narrator, Nolan still pulls off an incredible twist.
While Leonard’s condition makes him easy to manipulate, he’s also lying to himself by selectively choosing what to remember and what to include in the evidence he carries around. Memento uses noir and revenge thriller tropes to condemn the themes of those genres. Leonard has made himself an eternal victim driven forward by a mystery he already solved, because otherwise he’d have to accept his own role in his wife’s death.
The film’s two plot arcs collide in a spectacular shot of a black-and-white Polaroid resolving into color as it sets the stage for the film’s final sequence. As the plot finally clicks into place, we learn that Leonard already killed John G. long before the movie began, but it didn’t bring peace to his fractured psyche. Meanwhile, Teddy turns out to be a corrupt cop who manipulates Leonard into doing his dirty work. Confronted by the truth, Leonard chooses to make Teddy his next John G. rather than break the cycle.
Memento’s final twist feels like a precursor for Nolan’s work to come. Like Leonard, Inception’s protagonist Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is haunted by memories of his late wife. He ends the film deciding he doesn’t even want to know if he’s awake or dreaming so long as he gets a happy ending, a reflection of how Leonard would prefer to imagine himself a questing hero rather than accept the truth of his broken life. The Prestige is another examination of the self-destructive urge for vengeance with a twist that shows how committed Borden (Christian Bale) is to living a lie.
In the quarter decade since Memento, Nolan has solidified his status as one of the greatest filmmakers of his time. Oppenheimer won him his first Oscar. His 2014 science fiction spectacle Interstellar — which also plays with the passage of time and the nature of cause and effect — has become as influential on modern sci-fi as 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Dark Knight is a masterpiece of superhero mythmaking. But Memento is the most important movie in Nolan’s career. It’s the film that brought him widespread acknowledgment while also establishing the themes, techniques, and obsessions that would drive his career for 25 years.
