Views of a Patzer!

I know this film is quite old now, but still, when I saw this again in DVD, I felt the same awe/confusion I felt when I watched it 2 years back!! This film can easily win a top-10 position in the most complex films ever made.

WARNING: If you haven't seen the film yet, go see it now and then read this. This post is just a big spoiler.

All the mystery/suspense movies you have seen so far, most probably, had the story unfolding in a linear fashion, right? Like, he found his wife dead, got some clues, solves one clue and finds a fellow/object. From there he goes to the next clue blah blah blah, right? This film shatters that normal (!?) way of story-telling. Actually, this film's beginning is its end. Confused? Don't be, because there is still more to come :-) Leonard Shelby is an Insurance agent. One fine day, his wife gets molested & killed by two men. He shoots one of them, a masked one, but the other one hits him with something hard. Leonard (Lenny) looses the ability to persist short-term memories because of this. Cops think that there was only one fellow; their version is something like, Lenny found a masked person molesting his wife and when that fellow hit Lenny on the head, he shot him. They don't believe Lenny's version of 2 men. Lenny remembers everything that happened right up to that incident, but nothing persists in his memory bank after that blow to his head. He knows his wife's molester is still out there somewhere. He wants revenge, he decides to go after some John G, who he believes killed his wife. But how do you find someone, let alone kill him, when you keep forgetting things that happened 10 minutes back?! He comes up with an ingenious solution - keeping notes & taking pictures. He has seen one of his clients, Sammy, suffering from a similar disorder. Lenny believes that by repeating things/facts, he can condition his mind to recognize them. He uses a Polaroid to take pictures of persons/places he wants to remember. He writes notes to himself on back of those photographs. He also keeps a detailed map, putting all these photographs in to a macro perspective, to know where everything fits. However, notes and pictures can be lost! So, he tatoos all important facts about his wife's killer in his body!! Since there is no memory of what he did 10 minutes back, he is vulnerable to exploitation by people who take advantage of his condition. Can he trust anyone? Can he find the killer on his own? These are the questions you get reading the story of a normal suspense thriller, but not here! This film totally produces a completely different set of questions.

As I said earlier, the film starts from the end. Firsy, you get to see Lenny kill John G! From there, the movie is in a rewind mode. There are actually two threads in this film: First thread takes you through this gradual rewinding, showing what happened before Lenny killed John G, in bursts of 10 minutes, while the next thread is in a chronologically correct manner. The second thread is shown in B & W. Slowly these two threads converge! This way of story telling, AFAIK, is (or atleast was, back in 2001!) very new. This could have easily left the viewers totally confused. So, every scene in thread one, has overlapping shots with the next 10 minutes burst. By some clever editing and a strong screenplay, director Nolan puts the viewers under a spell. Thinking about this, I remember one of my friends' comments: "Your humor is dry. It makes you laugh immediately, but later makes you wonder why you laughed!" You can say the same thing here. You are gripped by the way story unfolds, or rather folds, but when the credits roll, you are left with so many questions unanswered. You will see that many innocuous looking scenes that you previous overlooked have a hidden meaning! These unanswered questions, I am sure, forces you to watch the film again :-) I saw this twice and the second time, with the right perspective, I found many small things highlighted in the beginning that makes sense only when you have the total picture. The strong point of this film is, it doesn't say that something happened this way or that way, it leaves that to the viewer to conclude. So, everyone gets to form their own interpretations! This is a clever way of involving the audience. Unlike other suspense movies, this one doesn't straightaway give you the puzzle and its solution, instead it concentrates on giving you only the puzzle and many clues (or facts) from which the viewer can form any number of conclusions!! I loved this concept. Because of this, you think about this movie and its umpteen unanswered questions even after the movie ends! Isn't this what every director craves for?! Audience remembering the film for a long time to come!!

Did Lenny kill the right John G? Has he killed people before? Who took the missing pages from the police file? Is Lenny saying the truth when he is talking about Sammy? Does Sammy really exist? Are Sammy and Lenny the same persons? How did Lenny's wife actually die? Is she a diabetic? Did Lenny himself kill her? Did he strangulate her or just overdosed her with Insulin? Is searching for John G just a ruse for Lenny to be a psychopath? Woah! I need to see the film again!

Bottom line: This film has CLASSIC written all over it! Go see it. Do tell me what you think.

PS: Check out this page, which talks about the story telling technique used by Christopher Nolan. Excellent stuff.