Movie romances often attract couples on first dates, but beware of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This bipolar romance has a good chance of making first-daters run screaming out of each other’s arms.
The better audience for the film may be couples who have been together long enough that they’ve questioned why they’re still together – and then decided to stay together anyway. In other words, this isn’t a romance about the flowering of first love, but about learning how to make a mature love stay in bloom.
Considering Eternal Sunshine is the latest product from the inventively insecure mind of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), I realize this is the sunny interpretation. The movie could just as well be about the futility of falling in love. Yet Kaufman taps into an emotional vein here that his previous larks were missing, a vein rich enough for me to overlook the bitter in favor of the sweet.
This time Kaufman’s skewed world centers around Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), an unremarkable, Corolla-driving Everyman who discovers his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), has had all her memories of him erased. Joel tracks down the quack who performed the operation (Tom Wilkinson) in order to undergo the same procedure, but he begins to have second thoughts as pieces of his past slip away one by one.
Carrey has never been better, finally nailing the balance of comedy and drama that has eluded him in almost every one of his serious endeavors. He’s truly drawn in – not just quieter – giving us a nuanced picture of a man whose life would be suicidally ordinary if it weren’t for the hope of love.
It makes sense that love arrives in the form of Winslet’s Clementine, whose hair constantly changes color but always to some graffiti-bright hue. She’s the sort of abrasive extrovert – the real-life version of Jennifer Aniston’s free spirit in Along Came Polly – who would bully the shy Joel into a date. Soon they are immersed in one of those yin-and-yang relationships. She lets him breathe; he gives her flightiness a place to roost.
True to form for a Kaufman movie, most of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes place within Joel’s brain. As Joel lies unconscious during the operation, we slip along with him in and out of scenes from his past, all visualized by director Michel Gondry through slick theatrical trickery and subtle special effects. Gondry and Kaufman turn Joel’s mind inside out, and then let us run around in it as if it were a psychological playhouse.
Smart, self-deprecating humor follows. When Joel tries to save one of his more precious memories of Clementine, she tells him, “Hide me somewhere deep. Hide me in your humiliation.” You can probably imagine where she winds up. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has more laughs than you would ever expect from a movie whose title comes from an Alexander Pope poem.
Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Kirsten Dunst all add humor and pathos as the doctor’s bumbling assistants. Each fumbles through romance in his or her own way, sadly believing that erasing memories of bad relationships can lead to happiness. “Adults are this mess of sadness and phobia,” says Dunst, echoing what could very well be Kaufman’s driving assumption.
To be fair, Eternal Sunshine is as much a triumph for Gondry as Kaufman. The former music-video and commercial director previously worked with Kaufman on 2002’s Human Nature, which I found to be far funnier and more perceptive than the Kaufman-Spike Jonze Oscar honoree of that year, Adaptation.
Here he’s taken a rather simple, science-fiction concept about erasing memories and fleshed it out with everyday surrealism. There’s a wonderful shot of Joel and Clementine waking up to find their bed on the wintry beach where they first met. Gondry puts into visual terms the way ordinary life can baffle us, the way we cling to our good memories but also keep ourselves from creating new ones.
Most of Kaufman’s films have trouble ending; George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind may be the sole exception. When you turn in on yourself multiple times, you tend to lose sight of the exit sign. Eternal Sunshine represents a huge step forward in that it manages to come to a conclusion that feels just right. The movie’s final scene is uneasy, yet optimistic. This isn’t the sort of romance that will make you fall in love, but it might just make you fight harder for the love you have.
