Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
A movie review by Jonathan Moya
**** (out of 5)
Joel Barish: Jim Carrey
Clementine Kruczynski: Kate Winslet
Dr. Howard Mierzwiak: Tom Wilkinson
Stan: Mark Ruffalo
Patrick: Elijah Wood
Mary: Kirsten Dunst
Frank: Thomas Jay Ryan
Carrie: Jane Adams
Rob: David Cross
Train Conductor: Gerry Robert Byrne
Focus Features presents a film directed by Michel Gondry. Written by Charlie
Kaufman. Running time: 108 minutes. Rated R (for language, some drug and
sexual content).
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Jim Carrey speaks from his mouth
and not his ass. The result is one of his most effective performances in
years.
Of course, this is a Charlie Kaufman scripted film, a grand piece of
metafiction that jumbles up film time and narrative into a puree of mixed
memories and emotionally goofy characters of which Jim Carrey's Joel Barish
is probably the least oddball of the lot.
Barish is depressed, shy and withdrawn, and Carrey plays him with a minimal
of facial animation. His voice is growled down half an octave and tails off
into a hint of an echo- appropriate for a character who wants to forget.
Barish wants to forget Clementine (Kate Winslet) because she has decided to
forget him. Dr. Harold Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) has invented a machine that
can erase memories. Clementine had used it to remove her memories of Joel,
and now Barish, knowing it will be the last thing the two will ever share,
has decided to use it to excise the last of Clementine from his mind.
Halfway through the procedure Joel changes his mind, but still under heavy
sedation and unable to object, the work continues.
An elaborate game of hide-and-seek ensues, as Barish assisted by the last
strong thoughts of Clementine, tries to squirrel away memories of their love
in places of his mind far beyond the reach of the techies (Elijah Wood, Mark
Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst) and the memory machine.
Charlie Kaufman has gotten a lot of mileage and prestige rummaging the
wilder objects stored in the left side of his brain. His screenplays are
brain farts that fracture film sense and imagination into their own twisted
sensibility.
To date, the only writer to receive an Oscar nomination for himself and his
doppelganger ( the pseudonymous Donald Kaufman for Adaptation), a neat trick
in itself, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is Kaufman's second brain
film.
Being John Malkovich was a loopy time travel/mind travel comedy that layered
commentaries on imagination, time and space, and everything in-between, into
a structure that bent sci-fi into whackery and absurdism into the clever,
self-contained conceits that lunatics spend all their time creating. This
1999 film was the 2001 spaced-out oddity of the millennium.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a relative tornado compared to the
Hurricane of invention of Being John Malkovich. This is pared-down,
stripped-down screen writing from a great nonlinear mind, almost brain
surgery done with a fork. The surgery may be sloppy but the results are an
incredible sight, even if the head surgeon is left slurping spaghetti
through his nose.
This is a more accessible, focused and muscular Charlie Kaufman- one not
afraid to explore and stick with variations on one particular theme, the
internal nature of love. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind achieves a
sense of emotion, pathos, almost a semblance of an inner reality connected
to experience and a real world. It has humanity, and more importantly, a
sense of tragedy-- as a man watches his memories slip away.
Kaufman is exploring the brave new world of real feelings, or at least the
idea of them, and at the same time becoming a deeper and more mature writer.
Absurdism has long since married his mind and now has engaged his soul.
With a stable of consistent directors, alternating between Spike Jonze
(Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Michael Gondry (Human Nature, Eternal
Sunshine), each in tune with the Kaufman vision- the right and left eyed
Oompa Loompa's of the Charlie rainbow factory are poised to take control of
the Hollywood dream machine for generations to come.
Michael Gondry has picked up on the naturalistic lighting that Spike Jonze
used in Being John Malkovich. These are memories with a high grain content.
Things and people disappear as quickly as exploding body parts at the edge
of a frame in a war movie. If love is a construct, then it is forever in
danger of being blitzed out of existence.
Barish realizes that the essence of life exists in bittersweet remembrance--
the need to maintain one's own identity even as everything is being sucked
down a black hole.
The other subplots, all involving love and identity theft, love and
forgetting, are handled with a straight forward orderliness that gives
credence to the hopscotch happening in Joel Barish's brain. Wood, Ruffalo,
Dunst and Tom Wilkinson all give capable support.
Kate Winslet as Clementine has a whimsicality that is forever disguising the
fact that her character exists at the edge of being a conceit. In this
escapade she is the Beatrice that guides Joel through the purgatory of love
lost, reclaimed and rediscovered again- a journey that goes from imagination
to reality.
It is one of the oddities of cinema that Jim Carrey's greatest performance
would be for something existing only in his mind. Deep inside the neural
synapses his manic electricity has channeled itself into a human being. This
is a natural performance- light as air but with just enough gravity to keep
it earthbound. The danger of near erasure keeps Carrey fresh and close to
the edge, pushes him in a near perfect acting partnership, in the constant
tilt of Kate Wisnlet's presence. Without her, he is inert.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a bold break to a newer and more
nonlinear cinema. The New Hollywood has arrived, and merry jesters and
jugglers are at the head of the parade. I hope they don't drop the ball.
Copyright 2004 Jonathan Moya
http://www.jonathanmoya.com
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