15 Minutes (Ago)

Thrillers have it harder than any other movie genre these days. Comedies and dramas can succeed just by aping the effects of a previous popular success. Notice how Meet the Parents cashed in on the kind of Ben Stiller humiliation comedy that proved so winning for There's Something About Mary, and how the sure-fire Oscar-winner Gladiator got away with delivering Braveheart to us all over again, presumably right down to the latter film's Best Picture victory at the Academy Awards back in 1996. Even Pearl Harbor's terrific preview tries its best to look like Titanic's terrific preview of a couple of years ago.

It was like this, for a while, for crime pictures as well. Many lesser movies gleefully aimed to reproduce either the same witty repartee or the mix of blood and yuck that made Pulp Fiction so singular. (Entries in Pulp Fiction look-alike contests keep coming: The Mexican, produced by Pulp Fiction's Lawrence Bender, tries to stuff Pulp Fiction's brand of straight-faced comic nastiness into the more-familiar burrito of over-bright big-star romantic comedy, but the result tastes funky.)

But shortly after Pulp Fiction, one un-imitable movie came along, and its effects have proven nearly impossible to replicate, though Lord knows they've tried.

The Usual Suspects, the 1995 trick-pony starring Kevin Spacey, is up there with Pulp Fiction in terms of influence, at least if all the "surprise" endings we've been treated to since are any guide. After The Usual Suspects, many self-respecting thrillers tried for a little kick at the end, but for every Sixth Sense, where the shock worked, there were a dozen failed attempts like Fight Club, which is a good movie in spite of its strained Keyser Soze-type ending.

The latest of this overworked ilk is 15 Minutes, a self-righteous buddy-cop story starring Robert De Niro and Ed Burns, unremarkable except for the original twist that comes halfway through the movie. But the twist--like the twists in a lot of movies that imitate the twists in The Usual Suspects--only works as an entertaining but brief jolt, and the movie doesn't get any better because of it. It actually gets worse.

Since the genre thrives on surprise, thrillers can't just raise the ghosts of old powerhouses the way that Gladiator recalls Braveheart. For a movie today to have a Usual Suspects-like effect, it may not borrow. A really good thriller has to come up with its own all-encompassing gimmick. Essentially, it has to retool the genre all by itself.

Memento does this.

An invigorating neo-noir from new director Christopher Nolan, Memento stars Guy Pearce as Mr. Short Term Memory, a former insurance investigator named Leonard Shelby who can't remember anything that happened more than 15 minutes ago, all because he suffered a blow to the head when he tried, unsuccessfully, to save his wife from being raped and murdered. Now, as he sets out to avenge her death, he depends on the clues he's collected and grotesquely tattooed on his body, so as not to forget or lose his way.

Memento is terrific because it takes the reliable crime-movie theme of unreliability and extends it farther than it maybe has ever been extended before.

Memory is unreliable. Leonard's tattoos are unreliable. Leonard is unreliable. His friends, The Matrix's Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano, are unreliable. And narrative is unreliable too.

In the movie's most brilliant innovation, the entire story rolls backwards, scene by scene, so that the ending is the beginning and the beginning is at the end. Nolan structures the movie like a short-term memory test of its own, and if viewers can make it through the whole thing without feeling like they need to see it again, their brains probably operate on a higher plane than the majority of the people sitting around them.

The movie has its weaknesses: it's tiring, it feels like a really clever Showtime movie sometimes, and the last scene has too much talking to fill in the exposition. But it's that rare movie that successfully moves out of the Usual Suspects shadow and becomes an original blueprint of its own.

The Mexican opened last Friday; 15 Minutes opens tomorrow; Memento opens March 16.