The proof consists of his repeatedly injecting her with insulin for her diabetes over a short period of time at her request. In one harrowing scene, Sammy proves to his wife (Harriet Harris) that he does indeed suffer from short-term memory loss, despite her own hopeful doubts that he is only pretending to be afflicted. Consequently, Sammy was denied Workman’s Compensation to pay for his enormous medical bills. Leonard decided that Sammy was faking his condition because Sammy seemed to flash an expression of recognition at Leonard’s second visit. The case involved a claim of short-memory loss by a worker named Sammy (Stephen Tobolowski). Then, right in the middle of the story, there is a digression to a case Leonard handled as an insurance investigator. Even the flashbacks to Leonard’s idyllically presented wife do not give us enough information about what kind of life they led together. The audience is left with no subordinate characters to trust, with the result that the paranoia spreads from the protagonist to the spectator. Indeed, Leonard has made a note at some unremembered period not to believe anything Teddy says. A persistently genial pest named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) keeps stalking him with a strange cheerfulness that seems suspicious.
Motel managers keep shifting him to cheaper rooms at the same expensive prices. Far from taking pity on Leonard’s bizarre condition, the people he encounters seek ways to exploit him. He is befriended by a mysteriously motivated waitress named Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), who has her own agenda for Leonard in the disposal of her abusive boyfriend. Leonard has no money problems as he drives around in his Jaguar, stopping at seedy motels out of Raymond Chandler’s southern California to question potential witnesses and suspects in the case. There is no official collaboration with the police, who have written off the case because Leonard himself managed to kill one of the criminals before he was shot, and the police do not accept his story of a second predator. We are at the end of the story, and we are being pulled back to the beginning of one man’s quest to avenge the crimes against his wife. In the opening moments, a murder rewinds on-screen: a photograph undevelops and is sucked up into a flashing Polaroid a bloody carnage is reassembled into human features as a gun barrel pulls away from a twisting mouth. Instead, we are thrust immediately into his troubled mind. Normally, one would expect a few hospital scenes with the usual medical mumbo-jumbo to authenticate Leonard’s condition. The only way he can keep track of what has happened in his recent past is to take Polaroid pictures, make notes and even adorn his body parts with tattoos to record what he has learned. The program notes describe his condition as “a rare, untreatable form of memory loss”: He remembers the crime itself vividly, as well as everything that happened to him before that point, but since the damage to his brain he cannot retain a new memory longer than 15 minutes. The reconstructed premise is this: Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a one-time insurance investigator, has completely lost his short-term memory after being shot during the rape-murder of his wife. I must confess that, while the end credits were rolling, I decided that there was no real payoff for the story, which had been told in an always-uncertain sequence of images and impressions. Christopher Nolan’s Memento, from a screenplay by Christopher Nolan, based on a short story by Jonathan Nolan, is a difficult film for me to describe or evaluate because it sets its own rules for the audience to follow–which it does at its own peril.