If
you could see the bitter middle of your relationship, would you
even bother to begin? That’s the central question of Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by Charlie Kaufman, directed
by Michel Gondry and starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
Carey, looking gaunt and tense, plays Joel, a glumly tentative working
man on Long Island. Winslet plays Clementine, a wacky, talky chick
with a dysfunctional relationship to Manic Panic who wears sweatshirts
on dates and bustiers to her job at Barnes and Noble. They meet
on a Hamptons beach—twice. Their relationship has a beginning
(off-season, snowy, fateful) but it also had another, earlier beginning
(barbecue, mutual friends, ordinary.) This can be because Joel and
Clementine have both had the other erased from their respective
memories.
Yes, it’s a device, yes, it’s a mind-bender straight
from the brainy-brain of Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Adaptation,
Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and an ill-fated
picture also directed by Gondry called Human Nature. Kaufman seems
to bug a lot of people lately; many critics have tired of his clever
plots and hipster collaborations. If you’re just going to
gripe about how it’s so confusing, 50 First Dates is probably
still playing down the hall. Eternal Sunshine is a heartbreaking
film about a very real relationship that manages to be gritty and
dreamy at the same time. It might not make perfect sense, getting
mired, as most memory movies do, in the usually conundrum of “well,
if they went back and did that, wouldn’t it change what make
them go back...” That’s a hard nut to crack, all right,
but loosening your grip on the logic wheel ever so slightly will
greatly increase your enjoyment of this movie.
And it does make sense, in dream logic—more subconscious sense
than anything you’ve probably seen in a long time, as the
images meld with the emotional content of the script. Gondry has
directed many an acclaimed video: He sent multiple drum kits marching
through New York in “The Hardest Button to Button” by
the White Stripes, (he made three of their videos) and chased Bjork
through a forest with a giant teddy bear (in “Human Behavior”,
one of seven beautiful and dark videos he directed for her songs.)
Eternal Sunshine mixes the surreal with the goofily absurd (a helmet
contraption that can erase specific memories) and the bleakly real
(commuter trains, office affairs).
Joel and Clementine begin the movie as a milquetoast with a heart
of gold and a pushy broad with a head of hair dyed “Blue Ruin.”
The elliptical story reveals that, following months of all-too-dishearteningly
romance-killers like bickering about housework over Thai food, Clementine
decides to end their relationship. And erase it from her memory,
at a company called Lacuna, Inc., where a bouncy blond secretary
(Kristen Dunst) books appointments with a pair of bumbling technicians
played by Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood. When Joel finds out what
his girlfriend has done, he decides to do the same. Only, as is
apparently the case with many of Joel’s decisions, he’s
not entirely sure.
When he’s unconscious in his bed undergoing the procedure
(while Dunst and Ruffalo bounce around his apartment in their underwear
and Wood plots to woo Clementine) Joel changes his mind. He begins
to try to save his memories of Clementine from the past-annihilating
procedure, stashing her in his childhood memories where she could
not have possibly been—thus, where the machine won’t
be looking. The tactic makes for some of the movie’s best
scenes as Joel delves ever-deeper into obscure recollections, giving
Carrey the chance to play “baby Joel,” in pajamas under
a table in his parents’ ’70s kitchen, and a slightly
older boy, in poignant Superman cape, undergoing neighborhood humiliation.
Clementine finds a role in these scenes, and it somehow brings the
two closer together even as they are being literally torn apart.
It all adds up during the last scenes in the movie, when Joel and
Clementine have just met—again—and find evidence of
their previous relationship. Faced with an image of each other at
their worst, they decide to fall in love anyway. They aren’t
starting fresh with promises to do it right; they’re accepting
each other, knowing she will be shrill and he will be boring and
maybe, in the end, that’s just fine. A2P
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