As I mentioned above, asserting that “Memento” is a tale told backward is actually superficial — even misleading. Nolan has in fact done something more complicated and way more clever than that. The shocking opening credit sequence, in which Leonard kills a corrupt cop named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano, the ubiquitous master of sleazebag characters, who played Ralphie on “The Sopranos” this year), is the only scene that literally runs backward: In it, we see a Polaroid photo undevelop, a bullet fly back up the barrel of a gun and Teddy come back to life briefly “after” the sound of the shot.
Memento could easily be chalked up to a gimmick. Take a basic film noir story, toss in a brain injury as an excuse, shake vigorously until the extremely mundane storyline is unrecognizable to anyone and voila you have an Oscar nominee. This would be a viable reading of the movie if it weren’t for the fact that most critics & reviewers that came to this conclusion failed to even comprehend the ‘basic’ storyline. In my opinion for a critic to come to this conclusion requires them to actually comprehend the ins and outs of the storyline before they dismantle it and discard it as basic noir tripe.
