Release Date: March 19, 2004
Starring: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson
Directed by: Michel Gondry
Written by: Charlie Kaufman
Distributed by: Focus Features
MPAA Rating: R (language, some drug and sexual content)
At the time he penned the screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the writer Charlie Kaufman had been defined by the two movies he did with the director Spike Jonze, Adaptation and before that Being John Malkovich. This is not a Spike Jonze film (it’s directed by Michel Gondry, who is most famous for his Björk music videos), but it could almost be, because it is as “meta” and multi-layered as the first two Kaufman/Jonze collaborations and just as stylishly directed. If it is true that the key to a good movie is pairing the right director with the right screenwriter, then Kaufman has found in Gondry an able backup for those times when Jonze is unavailable.
The way you can tell that this is not a Jonze movie is because it transcends its many narrative levels in a much more visual way. The two Jonze/Kaufman collaborations, and especially Adaptation, were about the story: where could an ingeniously creative writer take his audience, if the director gave sound treatment to the script? Gondry, in the director’s chair, has decided to exert much more influence. Like Malkovich and Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine is a journey through a man’s mind, but for the first time we have a truly visual representation of Kaufman’s meticulously plotted madness: rapidly evolving images, Alice in Wonderland-like distortions of perspective, shifting colors, and tangible orchestrations of light and shadow, to name only a few.
At the center of this is Joel Barish, who, as played by Jim Carrey, is a typical Kaufman hero: an unlucky-in-love pseudo-loser who is barely in control of his own life (and, like Kaufman’s previous leading men, there is the sense that it could go at any minute). Joel was once dating a woman named Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), who was attractive to Joel in the impulsive way of a girl who dyes her hair blue or bright orange, but following their nasty breakup, he discovers that she has undergone an experimental procedure to have all of her memories of him erased from her brain.
Determined not to let Clementine have the parting shot, Joel finds the doctor who did the procedure, Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), and requests that his own memories of Clementine be erased. Naturally for a Kaufman movie, this simple solution is hardly that. As the memories disappear from his brain, Joel discovers what most jilted lovers know: that not all memories of ex-girlfriends or -boyfriends are bad ones. But with the erasure procedure already underway, it’s impossible for Howard and his crew (played by Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood) to stop -- so Joel makes a desperate attempt from within himself to hold onto Clementine and hide her away in the deepest recesses of his memory.
Joel, the loser who makes good, may be a typical Kaufman hero (especially when, in an early scene, a frustrated Joel asks himself, “Why do I have to fall in love with every woman who shows me the least bit of attention?”), but the actor who plays him, Jim Carrey, is certainly not a typical Kaufman lead. In his previous two features, Kaufman had the benefit of actors (John Cusack and Nicolas Cage) who were superbly talented specialists, perfect for the writer’s distinct brand of main-character neurosis. To be sure, Carrey is a talented actor, but an unlikely one for a Kaufman feature: he is far too upbeat, a carryover from a career built on doing slapstick comedy. Even in his first dramatic feature, The Truman Show, it was Carrey’s perseverance that distinguished him as a force to be reckoned with in any genre. Asked to hide his enthusiasm under a hapless mop of brown hair and a permanently hangdog expression, Carrey complies and then some, fitting so well into this movie that it is quite possibly his best performance since Truman Show.
He has help, though: Gondry’s ubiquitous visual aesthetic is as much a character as Joel is, culled from sources as widely varied and subliminally connected as Alice in Wonderland and M.C. Escher. On a narrative level, it is almost impossible to describe how valuable Gondry’s appreciation of the visual medium is to the film’s eventual success, but on a visual level it will be quite obvious to the viewer. Joel’s mind is a tumultuous, apocalyptic place: in one scene he runs through Grand Central Terminal as people disappear around him, and in another an entire house collapses while he stands inside. Fading memories slide into blackness while the searchlight of his subconscious sweeps about like a police beacon tracking an escaped convict (which is, after a fashion, what Joel becomes when he attempts to halt the erasure process from within). Often Joel becomes trapped within a single memory he can’t let go of, running back and forth along the same city block in an infinite loop like so many characters in so many Escher prints.
Carrey also has a willing cohort in Kate Winslet, who, as Clementine and like most of the women in Kaufman’s stories, seems to exist only give the hero trouble in his love life. She is far too beautiful for him, but part of the hilarity of Kaufman’s tenderly bizarre sense of romantic comedy is watching insecure men struggle to impress women who quite obviously intimidate them.
Winslet is the most likeable Kaufman love interest yet, perhaps because unlike Catherine Keener in Being John Malkovich or Meryl Streep in Adaptation, she genuinely takes to our hero. She is also the most enjoyable, and her character is a perfect match for director Gondry’s pace: both have a compulsive touch that borders on a clinical disorder, as Gondry cuts from scene to scene with reckless abandon and Clementine flits from thought to thought and mood to mood with no regard for anyone else, least of all, it seems, Joel Barish. As Clementine, Winslet thrives in this bizarre world that Kaufman and Gondry have wrought. She may not have been the most obvious choice for the role of Clementine, but she was the last one and the right one.
Like Kaufman’s earlier movies, though, the plot proper is only half the fun; the rest is discovering just how transcendent the story is and waiting for the multiple layers to unfold, like peeling the skin off an onion or counting the rings in a cross-section of an oak tree. The story cuts between the recesses of Joel’s mind (to avoid the erasure, which has been designed to focus only on the part of his mind that deals with Clementine, he unearths some of his most embarrassing moments, like the time his mother caught him masturbating as a teenager) and the real world, where Howard Mierzwiak (whose title, “doctor,” has such a fly-by-night ring to it you expect him to be selling snake oil) and his crew perform the operation.
Enter a trio of hip and talented youngsters, played by Dunst, Ruffalo, and Wood, as Howard’s assistants, the three of whom smoke pot and drink beer while executing what is ostensibly a highly technical procedure, and to great effect. When the operation goes haywire, Dunst struggles comically to maintain a serious demeanor despite toking on a joint moments earlier, and Wood confesses to a series of embarrassing revelations about Clementine -- when they erased her memory, he inserted himself into her life using many of Joel’s lines, an eerie take on the old style-versus-substance argument (that is, does it matter more what someone says or who says it?).
The comedy of this barely competent mind-alteration team, who perform their procedures at night and with all the scheduled precision of cable television installation, contrasts starkly with the identity-thriller haste of the scenes inside Joel’s brain, and there are moments when it seems as though the movie will get away from Gondry and Kaufman. But Gondry and Kaufman are no novices. Beneath it all is the steady drumbeat of the movie’s conclusion, that certain relationships may be destined to fail, and fail badly, but that some mistakes are worth making. Like all of Kaufman’s stories, there is a patient order to the chaos, and the moment when it crystallizes is one of those splendid connections between the film and its audience: one that tickles our collective soul and makes us think, now this is the reason we go to the movies.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)