Random play: Unravelling Memento - the year's trickiest movie

By TIM WATKIN

Among the let-downs of the blockbuster season - Pearl Harbor bombed (critically anyway), Swordfish nose-dived and The Mexican went south - there's been a wee beauty of a film quietly doing big business.

Memento is the sort of film that revives your faith in the film-going public - dark, difficult, well-written and clever as hell, and it's still done great business.

In New Zealand, despite being released on only 16 screens out of a possible 98 cinemas so far, it has pulled in $500,000. For an arthouse film with next to no marketing, that's huge. It has run for 13 weeks, fluctuated between 8th and 15th place on the movie charts, and with only six prints in the country hasn't made it to many regional centres yet.

And you know it's going to do great business on video and DVD. In case you haven't heard, the story is told backwards, with numerous non-linear flashes of memory and incident. Just the kind of film you want to freeze, rewind, and stop so you can think for a bit.

It's so damned complex. I came out wanting someone to make sense of it for me. Example: I noticed the flashing image near the end that had Leonard (Guy Pearce) in bed with his wife with the tattoo "John G raped and killed my wife" already on his chest. Having that tattoo when his wife was still alive didn't make sense. And it didn't seem that Teddy's explanation in the final scene could be entirely true.

But guess what? Everyone was at least as perplexed as me.

For the best unscrambling, check out Andy Klein's movie feature on salon.com. He has watched the film five times, broken each of the black and white scenes into a number sequence from one to 22 and the colour scenes into letters from A to V and tells the story from beginning to end (rather than end to beginning).

There are a few answers on the ew.com site too. (Warning: if you haven't seen Memento, ignore the next few paragraphs - they'll ruin the surprise.)

Some of the theories include:

* Once Teddy tells Leonard he has been tricking him into killing people for some time, Leonard purposefully manipulates himself into killing Teddy even though he knows, for those few minutes, that Teddy didn't kill his wife.

* About 20 minutes from the end there's a shot of Sammy Jankis sitting in what appears to be a mental institution. Someone passes in front of him and for a second, we see Leonard has taken his place in the chair - that suggests Teddy was honest in saying Leonard killed his own wife with insulin. On the other hand, Leonard's condition means he can remember everything from before the murder. So if his wife was diabetic, he would remember that.

* Most importantly, perhaps some of the flashes are simply inaccurate. On purpose. Maybe the scene of tattooed Leonard in bed with his wife is his own fantasy of perfection: both having avenged his wife and got her back.

Early in the movie Leonard tells Teddy, "Memory is unreliable ... it's not even that good ... memories can be changed or distorted." Writer-director Chris Nolan has said that "one of the things the film says is that in real life - unlike in movies - there is no objective truth." (Non-viewers: come back in here).

So maybe this is the point: This film is about memory. In reality we misremember. So does Leonard.

Maybe that's why there seem to be parts of the film that are contradictory. Nolan insists it's all intentional, that there is a "true view" of the movie and he knows what it is. But he also says the film is all about ambiguity and subjectivity (and grief and memory), so he's not spilling any beans.

We'll have to accept that at face value. Fact is, if he has purposefully included inaccuracies while still holding the storyline together, that makes the feat even more remarkable.

The Usual Suspects stands as one of the smarter American films, but its cleverness was condensed into one big twist at the end. Memento matches the mystery, but is also twisting and turning throughout.

As time goes by, it's becoming clear just how good this film is. It might be one of the cleverest, most intriguing American films ever made.