Leonard is trying to locate and murder the person who attacked him and his wife Catherine (Jorja Fox). Catherine is dead, and Leonard believes the unknown assailant killed her.
Leonard tries to keep up with his own investigation through notes, photographs, and tattoos that he will see after he no longer remembers what just happened. He is sometimes assisted in his detective work by annoying frenemy cop Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and brunette femme fatale Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss).
Leonard is fascinated by the story of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), whom Leonard studied as part of his job as an insurance claim investigator, prior to his accident. Sammy also had short-term memory loss, and it led to the death of his wife (Harriet Samson Harris).
As the plot unfolds, it becomes obvious that both Teddy and Natalie are manipulating Leonard for their own selfish purposes. Natalie wants to get rid of a man named Dodd (Callum Keith Rennie) for reasons unknown. Teddy has apparently turned Leonard into a serial killer, taking him from town to town to murder drug dealers and seize their cash and stash. Leonard has been manipulated into a belief that each victim is the man from the home invasion.
The film is present in segments of several minutes each. Color scenes are in reverse chronological order. Black and white scenes are in chronological order. This gimmick, along with the unreliable witness of the entire cast, makes the movie difficult to follow. In fact, what actually happens during the film depends upon which character you decide to trust.
How others will see it. Memento was not a box office goliath, but its video release was spectacular. At imdb.com, it has over 1.1 million user votes. The user rating of 8.4 out of 10 is remarkably high. Ratings decline moderately with advancing age of the viewer, from 8.7 under age 18, to 8.2 over age 45. Men bestow a higher average grade (8.5) than do women (8.2). But any grade over 8.0 is extremely high.
The movie received a Best Original Screenplay nod from both the Oscars and Golden Globes. The acclaimed film was instrumental to the career of its director, Christopher Nolan, who won Screenwriter of the Year at the AFI Awards, and went on to box office glory with the Batman franchise.
Memento was lauded for its originality. Many viewers are fascinated by the film's structure and plot, and consider it a master riddle instead of an inkblot open to multiple interpretations.
How I felt about it. Memento is an above average movie that has problems. The most obvious is the movie's structure. It is true that Quentin Tarantino gets away with jumping back and forward in time in, for example, Pulp Fiction. But he doesn't do this two dozen times in the same movie. It is a gimmick instead of an innovation. Its intent is to disorient the viewer in a manner similar to Leonard. Its result, though, is to turn the story into a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces don't fit unless you force them.
Another problem is the finale plot twist, akin to The Usual Suspects or Fight Club, which makes a mockery of the rest of the movie. We are to believe that a man without short term memory is able to take out hardened drug dealers, one on one, over and over. He may not remember it, but he is the luckiest man on Earth to have survived all this killing and still have his freedom.
And if Leonard is Sammy, and killed his diabetic wife, then all of the scenes with Sammy never happened, or happened in a much different way. What woman is stupid enough to "test" her husband into giving her a fatal injection. Why would Natalie encourage a beating from Leonard, whom she barely knows, for the unlikely prospect that Leonard would run this Dodd fellow out of town. At least temporarily.
Besides the film's novelty of excessively jumbled chronology, the film's appeal rests on the looks of its athletic lead and brunette bombshell. It's not the only mess of a movie to be praised. But it is no masterpiece.