Memories of 'Memento' at Tribeca

By Kevin Lally

In 2000, audiences at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals were among the first to see Memento, the ingenious second feature by a young British writer-director named Christopher Nolan. What a differencea decademakes. Today, Nolan is one of the most successful filmmakers in the world, having directed thethird-highest grossing film of all time, The Dark Knight (behind James Cameron's Avatar and Titanic).

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Memento, the Tribeca Film Festival on Saturday screened a handsome print of this riveting modern film noir, followed by a panel discussion moderated by NPR's Robert Krulwich with Jonathan Nolan, Christopher's brother and author of the short story on which the film is based, stars Guy Pearce and Joe Pantoliano, New School psychology professor William Hirst, and MIT professor of behavioral neuroscience Dr. Suzanne Corkin. The event was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which partners with Tribeca each year in awarding grants to narrative film projects that dramatize science and tecnology themes.

The Sloan Foundation connection in this case was the panel's consensus that Memento is one of the movies' most accurate depictions of how the brain and our memories function. For those unfamilar with the film, Pearce plays Leonard, a man who suffered brain trauma while fighting his wife's attacker and who is now unable to retain new memories. Despite his disorienting handicap, he is determined to find the man who murdered his wife. In a daring stylistic choice that mirrors Leonard's own chronic confusion, the sequence of events ispresented backwards in time, forcing the audience to piece together thefracturednarrative.

Jonathan Nolan confessed that when his brother proposed the backwards structure for his screenplay adaptation, he thought it was "a really bad idea," but later came to realize that the fun of the movie is discovering the story "in the moment" along with the main protagonist.

Pearce said that when he read the complexscript, he responded most strongly to the emotional plight of his character. During production, he didn't really worry much about navigating all the story's twists and turns, since from scene to scene, "I didn't need to remember."

Pantoliano, known to one and all as "Joey Pants," with credits ranging from the pimp in Risky Business to a lowlife in "The Sopranos," brought his typically brash perspective to the discussion of memory: "I say I nailed my wife on the first date; she says it was six months later."

Dr. Corkin noted that Memento isn't precisely about short-term memory loss per se, sincewe retain ourshort-term memoriesfor less than 30 seconds unless we rehearse or encode them. Dr. Corkin could draw from personal experiece in watching the film; for more than 40 years, she consulted with a patient who couldn't generate any new memories after brain surgery for a severe epileptic condition. In all their meetings over all those decades, he never recognized her.

For all those who feel their memories of Memento are clear, Jonathan Nolan revealed that the DVD deliberately contains slight differences from the original theatrical release. So seeing this widescreen modern masterpiece back on the big screen was truly a special event for the Tribeca crowd.