Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind

Taking Beautiful Chances

There’s speed and dexterity in Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s the type of movie where you know you’re being manipulated and you love it. I think some of the mysteriousness that comes out of one’s viewing is trying to figure out what you have been manipulated from. Gondry knows how to make a movie; every scene works perfectly for an audiences delectation. You might as well call it a delight, yet it’s not that simple. It’s not an easy to like film simply because you can see the themes coming right at you. When the characters yell, you know we're meant to take that as a sign of their loneliness and sob!, abandonment. Yet the movie never goes soft—when Jim Carrey’s character Joel Barish is running away from the oncoming doom of his mind being erased of all traces of his love Clementine (Kate Winslet), you never for a moment think he was a fool even though he got himself in this mess.

This crazy movie begins with Joel getting up from his deep slumber. Joel is one of those usual movie archetypes of the boring man with an unspecified job. (Usually in movies jobs are made so wearisome that they feel unspecified to us; here the joke is it isn’t even mentioned.) Joel is a listless human being, yet he’s not tiresome. He may be tired but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have all this pent-up energy in him. You wish women saw him the way we see him. That’s the reason we’re so apprehensive toward Clementine; why does she like him so much? Joel shares the audiences view—that’s why they break up. They’re so perfect for each other that it’s a relationship that was never meant to last.

Joel is heartbroken when he finds out that she has gotten all her memories of him erased. He wants to repeat the process for himself and enlists the help of Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), the doctor that originally performed the process on Clementine. This dubious operation involves Joel getting rid of every object he has that has some association with her. By the time the procedure starts, Joel is seeing red colors and experiencing severe deja-vu, almost as if he went through this procedure before. This human drama is anything but pedestrian.

The reason the movie works so well is because everyone is so grown-up. At least almost everyone; the two technicians working on the erasing process are Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood) and they’re comic inept fools. Why are they working on this deadly procedure? You learn that Patrick is actually dating Clementine and he’s using all of Joel’s adroit techniques in courting Clem. On the other side of the table, Stan is seeing the receptionist for Dr. Mierzwiak. They have an affair were pot and deep thoughts about life are a part of the mix. At this point the operation is going on in Joel’s apartment and it’s a funny image to see these two zonked-out love birds dancing on Joel’s bed. Of course he’s on the bed also; he’s positioned in between the fever dance. It seems that this comical section is merely in the background so the more serious story involving real love can shine, but the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman pulls a twist. He has it so human drama also happens to the young receptionist Mary. Mary is played by Kirsten Dunst and she gives the film a velvety kind of feeling. She’s the total opposite of the indurate Clem.

Clem is the type of woman where you don’t know what she will do next. An update of Catherine from Jules and Jim, Clementine shows her true feelings by the differing color dyes in her hair. She is that type of unstable woman where one minute you don’t want anything more to do with her and the next minute you can’t bear to see her go. Weeks after you see the movie, you can’t help but remember that smile that Kate Winslet lets shine throughout the film. Clementine (perfect name) is a wonderful part for Winslet to play because she’s a controlled calm actress playing an unstable person. Winslet tones down Clementine’s raging emotions and she makes it possible for us to care about her.

Carrey’s a totally different actor but not in this movie. A genius at shifting moods and a multitude of other things, Carrey lets loose in his own way. You feel at first that you wished he did the types of things he used to be famous for doing; almost as if he tired of doing them because everyone expected it of him. Joel Barish is a crying whimpering sort of person and I don’t think the director had much input in the way Carrey plays him. However, he does get to cut loose in certain scenes and perplex you. If he was laugh out loud funny, you probably wouldn’t have any real insight into his character. Then at some point, it’s almost as if Carrey got tired of the way he was playing Joel and lunged himself forward. You see it in the shot of him waiting for the bus to take him to his boring job and then deciding to go in the opposite direction to Montauk. It seems that his character has a subnormality all of a sudden. Carrey realized that he could take a risk and get to the same destination. When at one point in the middle of the film Joel in his subconscious state tries to hide Clementine in a place where the mind erasers can’t get to her—they go to his childhood—there’s a scene with Carrey thinking he’s a little boy and he’s taking a bath in a giant sink. Carrey takes another risk; he’s now laugh out loud funny.

I have to mention the awesome cinematography by Ellen Kuras. The lighting here really makes the movie. Most of the time a searchlight is following Joel in his subconscious. I think it’s the dusky look of the film that makes it so romantic. It’s probably what our dreams look like. This is one of the best uses of surrealism that has come about in a movie in some time. Gondry has a lot to do with this. Originally a music video director, he knows how to follow a scene through. He keeps it short and tight so as not to upset the viewer if the scene at some point goes south. A lot of the time you don’t have time to dwell on it. If we lose something in the process—a proper length to flesh out the story—we gain in not having our hopes ruined. Gondry is a filmmaker who (God bless him) believes in taking risks.

Kaufman in my opinion is a screenwriter who doesn’t. He sticks with abnormal scripts that are strange in terms of plot but nothing new is being explored here. The concept is really not that exciting. I thought that Being John Malcovich was imbued with Kaufman’s way with a story, and that’s why the movie was so wittily phlegmatic. John Cusack’s character constantly looked like he had the flu and it wasn’t funny. What’s new here is the aesthetic quality administered to the material. I think this movie has great wit in terms of its images. Gondry and Kuras give us beautiful shots like Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet lying on the cracked ice so it looks like broken glass and then taking it away from us through a quick edit, so it evaporates from our minds. The filmmakers are pulling the carpet out from under us; they’re taking away our memories.