Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Review
by Jonathan Moya (jmoya AT cfl DOT rr DOT com)March 30th, 2004
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Barish is depressed, shy and withdrawn, and Carrey plays him with a minimal of facial animation.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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