Z/Web

Director: Christopher Nolan

Wow, what a fantastic film! This, by far, is the best movie of 2001. It really pushes the film-making envelope. I was hesitant seeing it. I’d heard it was good, and also heard it was a little weird. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but sometimes it makes for an “arty” film that’s pretentious and boring. This was neither. It’s a fascinating film noir where how the story is told is just as important as the story.

The concept is simple: the main character’s a former insurance investigator who’s searching for the man who raped and killed his wife. He wants to kill the murderer. There’s one key problem, however: the man’s brain injury has left him no short term memory. It’s not amnesia: he knows who he is and where he came from, but he can’t make new memories. So if he meets you, in five minutes he’s forgotten it and he’s introducing himself again. This makes criminal investigation a challenge, to say the least.

The guy has a solution to his problem: he takes instant pictures and writes notes to himself. The “my car” picture tells him which car in the parking lot is his. A photograph of a motel reminds him where he’s staying. He can’t use the telephone because he’ll forget who he’s talking to without a face in front of him. It’s a bizarre life.

Director Nolan gets us into this life with an unusual gimmick: we experience the film in reverse. I mean the entire film is backwards! We see the end, where he kills the man who murdered his wife, first. Then we go backwards through his investigation, step by step. The film is entirely made up of flashbacks!

This no doubt sounds confusing. But astonishingly, it isn’t. Everything is extremely clear (more than in many films). Normally we know the past and the future is unknown. In this case, we know the future — he kills the murderer — but we don’t know the past. Just like him. But unlike him, we’ve seen the future and can remember it, so when we’re seeing something from his past, we can put the two together.

The result is incredible: as we put the pieces together, we’re constantly reevaluating our assumptions. For at each event, we assume that what we are seeing is reality. And it is, to an extent. The problem is that it’s reality based on the guy’s notes: he makes decisions based on what his previous self told him. This is the ultimate “blind-leading-the-blind” scenario! So a friend in one scene is an enemy, or maybe-enemy, in the next (previous). But since the guy can’t remember what happened earlier, he can’t tell when he’s being played. A good example of this is how the motel clerk rents him a second room, just to see if he’d notice. He doesn’t, and is paying for two rooms. And the scummy clerk openly admits this, knowing he’ll have forgotten by the next time they meet!

I won’t give away all the twists and turns of the plot: just go rent this film and watch it. It’s amazing. You’ll never think of reality in the same way again. It reminds me a great deal of the mind-bending stories of Philip K. Dick (especially