He’s trying to track down the man who raped and killed his wife, and the way that Nolan has structured “Memento,” in something like reverse order, Leonard is running toward his past and away from it at the same time.
Still the quintessential Nolan film: a head trip that seems to be taking place inside the main character’s head, if only because he’s working so hard to keep anything stored there. Guy Pearce, in a performance that’s like one long spasm of grungy noir intensity, is Leonard, an insurance investigator who suffers from anterograde amnesia, which makes it impossible for him to remember recent events. So he provides clues for himself: recording his experiences on Polaroids, tattooing key life events onto his body. He’s trying to track down the man who raped and killed his wife, and the way that Nolan has structured “Memento,” in something like reverse order, Leonard is running toward his past and away from it at the same time. The movie itself lives — tingles — on the knife edge of the present tense. It’s the cinema’s ultimate existential thriller, and it might all be a little too Rubik’s Cube crazy if it weren’t a human drama of such depraved fervor.