Brilliant mistake

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is a desperately moving ode to romance. Why do the filmmakers undercut its power with a bag of ironic tricks?

By Stephanie Zacharek

March 19, 2004 |

If you've ever had a dream in which you're painfully aware of having lost something, or someone, but you have no idea what or who has slipped away from you -- a dream in which an absence is a presence, a cookie-cutter-shaped hole moving like a ghost in the space around you -- you'll understand "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" intuitively. You may also find it devastating.

This is French director Michel Gondry's second full-length movie, written by Charlie Kaufman (with whom Gondry also collaborated on his first picture, the 2000 "Human Nature"). In "Eternal Sunshine," Jim Carrey plays Joel, a man who arranges to have every memory of his ex-girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), erased from his brain, only to realize that those memories may be more dear to him than the failed union itself: They're all he's got left.

The movie traces the romance in reverse-order flashbacks, starting with the most painful memories of the breakup and working forward to the earliest, sweetest ones. Joel realizes that in allowing bits of Clementine to disappear, he's also erasing chunks of himself. "Eternal Sunshine" is a meditation on the way other people go to work on us in ways we're barely aware of, like ghostwriters who grab the pen when we're not looking, writing new chapters for us that are better than any we could have come up with on our own.

The best moments of "Eternal Sunshine" are deeply and desperately moving: At times the picture feels achingly alive. In fact, the first 20 minutes or so of "Eternal Sunshine" are so free of gimmickry and self-consciousness that I almost couldn't believe it had been written by Kaufman, who has built a tidy career out of writing cool-weird puzzle movies, brain teasers for modern audiences who might get bored if they were left to do the work of simply confronting their emotions. Was there more to Kaufman than I'd previously given him credit for?

The answer is that, yes, there may be. And yet there's still not quite enough.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" represents a failure of nerve: As if Gondry and Kaufman weren't sure that the story of Joel and Clementine would hold us, the doomed couple's unfolding-in-reverse romance is intercut with a subplot filled with zany touches, like Mark Ruffalo as a sexy-awkward techno-geek in Nutty Professor glasses, and Kirsten Dunst as a dippy-adorable office assistant who edyercates herself by memorizing quotations from "Bartlett's." (In her most torturously cute moment, she recites from the poem from which the movie takes its title, attributing it to "Pope Alexander.") The ballad of Joel and Clementine is a piercing reverie, gorgeously sun-dappled and at times so wrenching that it's almost painful to watch. But whenever Ruffalo and Dunst -- or any of the movie's other numerous sidekicks, like far-from-mad-scientist Tom Wilkinson, or Elijah Wood as Ruffalo's well-meaning but dimwitted assistant -- appear, the movie jerks us out of our dream state.

You might argue that this is a dramatic device, a way of breaking what would otherwise be an incredibly intense story into easily digestible bits. But I think it's symptomatic of a much larger, thornier problem in moviemaking today, one that undercuts the reasons movies have come to mean so much to us, emotionally and culturally, in the first place: The '90s were all about ironic detachment -- it was uncool to care too much about anything, or at least to admit as much. Now that we've tread somewhat tentatively into the 21st century, most of us claim to have gotten over the irony thing. And yet, many of the movies of the past five years that have been hailed as inventive and interesting by young audiences -- pictures like "Memento," "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," the last two written by Kaufman -- are also movies that work hard to wow us with their jigsaw intricacies.

It's as if young filmmakers fear that their audiences will become bored with a movie if they don't have a clever mind-boggler to wrestle with along the way (the equivalent of a magnetic bingo game on a long car trip). In grappling with these perplexing riddles, we're supposedly exercising our intellect. But isn't it also possible that we're using them as a handy diversion, a way of distancing ourselves from emotions that might be too strong for us to deal with easily? Labyrinthine plots are supposed to stimulate us. But are they really just distracting us from the work at hand -- the work of feeling?

I'm not saying audiences shouldn't take pleasure in intricate movies. It can be exhilarating, and just plain fun, to feel your brain and your imagination working in tandem, as you do while watching pictures like "The Usual Suspects" or "Femme Fatale" or "The Big Sleep" (the last a movie that doesn't make much sense at the end, although getting there is so much fun that it hardly matters).

But just as there's a difference between knowing things and being informed, there's a difference between going all the way with a movie and going only as far as is convenient or comfortable. One of the most popular features ever run in Salon was a 2001 article called "Everything You Wanted to Know About 'Mulholland Drive,'" a dissection of every explicable or inexplicable mystery of David Lynch's ode to both the gleaming surface and tawdry underbelly of Hollywood. "Mulholland Drive" does work as a puzzle, and its intricacies are enjoyable. Personally, though, I'm much more interested in its hypnotic poetry and the tarnished-tinsel quality of its images. And while it's always fun to ponder Lynchian details, you can miss the point of Lynch's movies entirely if you spend too much energy pondering the significance of the scruffy maniac in the parking lot or the contents of the blue box.

That said, I suspect that whether they recognize it or not, audiences yearn for movies that can make them think and feel. And for many moviegoers, "Eternal Sunshine" may fit the bill. There's so much that's right with the movie that, just a few days after seeing it, I've already done a fairly decent job of blotting out everything I hated about it as I watched it -- we all have our own memory-erasing techniques.

Next page: A voice emerging from the seashell of our own deep subconscious