Review of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

Introduction

Timid workaday stiff Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), makes a once in a lifetime impulse decision to skip work and visit the chilly environs of Montauk, Long Island. He shivers on the sandy beaches, he doesn`t know why. On the train home he bumps into sparky, spirited extrovert Clementine (Kate Winslet) who`s wallowing in an odd mood, she doesn`t know why either. They talk, bonding over their shared, listless anomie before the film flips them in a dramatic u-turn.

In the second collaboration between director Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (after the little seen and poorly received `Human Nature`) `Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind` is an inverted romance where the spark of true love is discovered in the search for its elimination. When he discovers that former lover Clementine had her memories off him erased, Joel undergoes the same dubious bout of home-brew sci-fi brain surgery, courtesy of Tom Wilkinson and his rag-tag crew of student neuron fiddlers at Lacuna Inc., who work to "cure" patients of painful memories by chipping them from the deepest corners of the subconscious. Cue a metaphysical melange of sci-fi, romance, surreal fantasy and chase thriller as Joel rediscovers his lost love for Clementine, and makes a desperate attempt to save what memories he can as they flee from his grasp.

Video

A sombre feel to the visual style might come as a surprise for a director who honed his talents on gimmicky music videos, but the realist tones and hand-held cameras, combined with some dazzling smoke-and-mirrors scene transitions perfectly captures the film`s lucid dream aesthetic. A solid, if hardly mind-blowing transfer.

Audio

Good 5.1 and a substantial DTS track.

Features

Not a bad selection from Momentum, echoing the region 1 Focus disc, but showing no sings of treading water for the oncoming special edition: A random snatch of deleted scenes holds some treasures - Clem and Joel`s first date crashing a Broadway show is especially touching. There`s a commentary with Gondry and Kaufman, the soft-spoken latter and the oh-so-very-French-but-in-a-good-way former riffing off one another rather nicely. Aside from a few odd crumbs: indulgently weird promo for The Polyphonic Spree`s `Light and Day` and a fake Lacuna commercial, it`s above par stuff. There`s a funny, intimate chat with Gondry and Carrey that plays more like a superior `making of`, with excellent on-set footage and snippets explaining the ingenious force-perspective sets and the roots of Carrey and Winslet`s "chemistry." Indeed, the documentary is blessed with such a delicate and free-flowing whimsy, that one can`t help but think back to Gondry`s own video-autobiography `I`ve Been 12 Forever`, in its gentle attempts to disentangle reasoning from innocence, or maybe it`s the other way around…

Conclusion

A deliriously engaging romantic fantasy that, surprisingly, given its filmmakers` pedigree, touches the heart as much as the head. The actors trade on each-others` against-type casting to instantly sympathetic effect: their intimate chemistry giving the film a fine burnish of relationship reality even in its weirdest corners. Much of the credit for this must go to Gondry, whose unobtrusive direction sees straight into the film`s tortured romantic heart and lets it breathe, the usual piercing wit of Kaufman still in evidence but no longer smothering.

It`s delightful also to see such a heady high-concept narrative service, rather than dominate, a tender character story, allowing the humor and emotion to grow organically rather that be pried desperately from a linear, programmatic narrative. Nice also, to see the film`s witty dissection of sci-fi cliches: Whilst a writer like Asimov or Philip K. Dick might postulate Joel`s epiphany to strike back against his memory erasers as some kind of indivisible unit of the human will, Kaufman, in typically cynical style, suggests the discovery arises out of the incompetence of the bumbling employees at Lacuna rather than some unexplained arousal of a dormant spiritual "essence" in Joel`s psyche.

The film`s not perfect, there`s probably a couple of narrative ellipses too many, and Gondry can`t help but indulge in a few tone-stretching flights of fancy. Another flaw arises in the film`s secondary narrative: the Lacuna melodrama revolves too busily around a contrived soap-opera office politic, and too slickly slides into the final twist. What`s more it shatters the intense subjective delirium of Joel`s subconscious landscape. It would be a bolder, quite different, maybe superior though perhaps less embracing film if it took place entirely within it.

If Charlie Kaufman has become enough of a 21st century iconoclast (and there`s enough elliptical formal design in `Eternal Sunshine` to affirm the theory) he`s also renowned for his smarts and ironic remove rather than an intimate grounding in the emotional architecture of human life. What makes the film different from say, `Being John Malkovich` or `Adaptation` is that here the ingenious fractal narrative cuts right to the bleakly romantic heart of Joel and Clementine`s relationship. We fall in love again with our memories the film suggests, but it`s a different sort of love. Whilst replaying their ill-fated two years in his mind (in reverse no less, so his journey moves from collapse to blooming, recalcitrance to devotion.) Joel falls in love not with Clementine, but his image of her, his beatific ideal enshrined in memory, petrified in his longing, and who wouldn`t fall for that? It sounds like a bitterly bleak assessment of the narcissistic self-affirmation of human love, but it`s a tribute to the film`s emotional intelligence that Clementine, the real Clementine, has infected Joel`s mind far more than mere unreconstructed male fantasy. She`s become not simply a feature of his subconscious, she`s centered it, become the core around which all of his neuroses and flaws have come to orbit. Indeed, as Joel must bury her deeper in his mind to avoid erasing her, he finally reveals his secrets to her, and to us: deep childhood scars and oedipal neuroses.

If the narrative seems to wrap itself up all too easily, the film`s conclusion makes up for all that. In one of the most moving moments of unpolished romanticism the movies have given us, the two heart-broken lovers are confronted with what they truly felt about one another when all their fragile connections had withered away. All the angry truth they could never share, as well as their cruel, jilted spite, is spilt all over the idealism of their "new" love. It`s an unblinking moment of pure intimacy, and one that gives Gondry`s indulgence in the rotting phantasmagoria of Carrey`s self-destructing imagination a unique and haunting poignancy. Unlike most of the jigsaw narratives of late, where the final construct comes to resemble something as chaotic and disassembled as what we started with, `Eternal Sunshine`, in its final moments, comes together with such a frail and delicate power that not only does it mimic the intangible roots of our own relationships, but that something of the truth of human connections breathes softly out like waking from a dream. And the film is one of those rare treats, both wildly imaginative and deeply touching, that it ingrains one in the reality of that awakening, rather than shrinking from it back into the prison of dream and memory.