Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (MIchel Gondry, 2004)

Brain wash

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is yet another product of eccentric enigmatic scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman's brain, a light-footed riff on love loss memory forgetting.

It's the story of Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), who one day suddenly deviates from his work commute to hook up with bluehaired Clementine (Kate Winslet). They seem appropriate for each other in the way they're mismatched (Barish is moody and unsociable, Clem aggressively flirty); everything about the meeting feels off-key for some reason, and this feeling of discord leads to the revelation (typical in a Kaufman script) that everything isn't what it appears to be-- or everything doesn't stay the way it's supposed to be.

Turns out Clem and Barish were in an affair gone bad, that Clem had gone to a company named Lacuna Inc. to have all memories of the affair (and of Barish) erased. Barish, feeling the need for peace or resolution or some kind of revenge (most likely a wounded mixture of all three) goes to Lacuna to have Clem erased as well. All you have to do is visit their offices (which look like an HMO) sign up for the procedure, collect and turn in all artifacts and souvenirs of the memories to be erased (but what about joint checking accounts, shared properties, or-- god forbid-- children?), then go home and sleep while Lacuna employees wipe your memories clean.

There's a subplot involving Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) who owns the company, his secretary Mary (Kirsten Dunst), her technician boyfriend Frank (Mark Ruffalo), his colleague Patrick (Elijah Wood), each in his or her own way abusive of their power over the clients. It's meant to be a satire on the professionalism of-- scientists? Doctors? Therapists? Specialized service professionals? Kaufman isn't too clear as to what these people are supposed to be, exactly, though their hijinks make you wonder about what must go on under your nose while you're on anesthesia.

All wonderfully ingenious and evocative and expected from Kaufman, whose previous screenplays--among others Being John Malkovich, about a hapless puppeteer (John Cuzack) who discovers a fifteen-minute portal into actor John Malkovich's mind and sells tickets at the door; Adaptation, about an unfilmable novel on orchids and the attempts of one Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) to adapt the novel to the big screen-- showed that his is perhaps the most fertile fermenting minds working right now in mainstream Hollywood. French music-video director Michel Gondry helps Kaufman's script the same way music-video director Spike Jonze helped Malkovich and Adaptation, by making the transitions from reality to unreality (or in this case reality to memory) as palpable as possible: no obvious CGI, a heavy reliance on on-camera and theatrical effects, on understated surrealism.

But more than the imaginative storyline, the opportunity for a director to knock out strange imagery, and the chance for a talented cast to sink its teeth into a fleshy script, there's evidence that Kaufman has finally developed a living breathing heart. Not that he's unfeeling-- all his films have this intense melancholic loneliness-- but that his protagonists from Cuzack's puppeteer to Cage's Kaufman struggle to develop a relationship, to make a connection, the drama being about the attempt to achieve this basic level in human relations. In Eternal Sunshine Barish was with Clem and it's this relationship, this (Kaufman's reluctance to say the word aloud is infectious) love-- and Barish's belated efforts to preserve traces despite Lacuna's thoroughness-- that forms the film's emotional core.

To put it another way Eternal Sunshine unlike most of Kaufman's works is moving in the way it shows us a love being lost: gradually, painfully, with struggle. The process comes to evoke many things-- the terrible progression of Alzheimer's; a survivor's acceptance of a partner's death (or worse, a relationship's failure); the inexorably entropic quality of time itself.

Easily Kaufman's best work to date, and perhaps of much of the cast's-- Jim Carrey transcends his Plastic Man attempts at humor; Kate Winslet is a force of nature; Kirsten Dunst transforms annoying persistence into actual poignance; Tom Wilkinson underplays beautifully; and Elijah Wood helps wipe away memory of his endlessly weepy hero in those endless hobbit movies.

It's also of course a reworking (but what recent science-fiction film isn't?) of ideas of the late great Philip K. Dick: both the concept of memories manipulated by a corporate concern ("We Can Remember it For You Wholesale," basis for the Schwarzenegger / Verhoeven action flick Total Recall), and the concept of a character struggling against induced memory loss ("Paycheck," basis of the Affleck / Woo action flick of the same title). Instructive to note though that where Kaufman uses memory manipulation to prick our sense of nostalgia and loss, Dick uses it to supercharge our paranoia and fear (also interesting to note that relationships in Dick's books seem more adult than anything in Kaufman's scripts--but that's a whole different article right there). Suffice to say, Kaufman takes some of Dick's ideas (and slippery sense of reality) and uses it, fairly successfully, to his own distinctive ends.

First published in Businessworld 8/6/04