''Memento'' may be too clever to be a hit

”Memento” may be too clever to be a hit

There are movies that make you feel good: ”E.T.,” say, or ”Four Weddings and a Funeral.” Then there are movies that make you feel smart, like ”L.A. Confidential” or ”Shakespeare in Love.” And then there are the movies that are SO smart, SO clever, SO ingeniously Rubik like in their construction that they end up making you feel a little dumb — and loving it.

”Memento” is one of those movies, and it’s already on its way to deserved cult status. Like films as diverse as ”Being John Malkovich,” ”The Usual Suspects,” and ”The Sixth Sense,” ”Memento” dares you to keep up with it, flatters you into thinking you’ve got it sussed out, then pulls an 11th hour sucker punch that forces you to rethink everything you’ve seen.

And it does all this while telling its story backward.

”Memento” is the tale of insurance investigator Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a man obsessed with finding the scumbag who raped and murdered his wife. There’s just one catch: While fighting the bad guy, Leonard received a bump to his noggin that deprived him of his short term memory. He can’t remember anything that happened to him 10 minutes earlier. He doesn’t know if the woman he wakes up next to is a long term lover or a short term fling; he can’t remember, during a chase, whether he’s the chaser or the chasee. He’s forced to rely on external crutches like Polaroids and memos to himself in the form of tattoos strewn about his limbs and torso.

But if you don’t remember making the tattoo, can you trust what it says?

”Memento” opens with its final scene — Leonard whacks the guy he’s been after all this time (I’d say ”at last” but, really, it’s ”at first”). Then we work our way back, scene by scene, gradually accumulating the crucial hindsight that Leonard lacks — a lack that dooms him, it turns out, to living in a vengeful Möbius strip of profoundly existential proportions.

For a while, though, it seems like director Chris Nolan’s playing the standard neo- noir game. There’s a weary femme fatale (”The Matrix”’s Carrie Anne Moss) and a shifty best friend (Über weasel and new ”Sopranos” regular Joe Pantoliano); there are thugs that threaten and get shot. But the director either has bigger fish to fry or is so charmed by his tail eating narrative that he has no interest in the standard action payoff. ”Memento” becomes, daringly, a meditation on entropy — on how we’d all be stuck in delusionary loops if not for memory, and how maybe even memory isn’t enough to save us.

These are brave and uncommercial points to make, which is why ”Memento” is probably going to stiff when it widens out of the urban markets in which it has been doing quite well. And this is what separates the film from ready made cult objects like ”The Usual Suspects” or ”Pulp Fiction”: There’s no visceral, emotional payoff at the end. (How could there be, since it’s the beginning?)

”Memento” works brilliantly on a philosophical level — I’ve been thinking about it for days, in alternate gusts of invigoration and depression (the more you contemplate Leonard’s predicament, the more bone chillingly sad it becomes). It showcases some terrific acting from Pearce, Pantoliano, and especially Moss, whose character deepens and coarsens as the film unspools (respools?). And it’s undeniably one hell of a parlor trick.

In the end, though, Leonard’s tragedy is inextricable from the dazzling, cold genius of the film’s construction. Director Nolan has the nerve to deny his audience any sort of closure, and while part of me applauds that, another part wishes he wasn’t QUITE so clever.