Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I just rewatched one of my favourite movies of recent years: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I don't think Kaufman is flawless but what I love about his works is how he gives his misfits the stamp of humanity. Surely, a lot of this is influenced by his own experiences (so I’ve read of his youthful days as a loser), the yearning to be somebody else, the feeling of missing something, all that emotional baggage and whatnot.

Anyway, I'm not going to write a review of it cause I'm not a film critic. Luckily, one of the many hats that Patrick wears is fim critic (along with artist, cultural theorist, pianist, accomplished writer, talented cook, puh-lease, you sure know how to make a person feel ashamedly envious and completely inadequate. Thank god, my ego is fairly sturdy :p.)

Anyway, this is my intelligent boyfriend's review:

I went into this film very worried. Everyone had been telling me how good it was, how brilliant it was, and I have to confess I was sceptical. Charlie Kaufman irritates me; his scripts are - in my opinion - frequently misanthropic and juvenile, his huge, winking quotation marks as gratuitous as anything Jerry Bruckheimer would produce. The last film he did with Michel Gondry, Human Nature, was one of the worst movies of 2001. Eternal Sunshine, however, defeated my expectations easily. This is far and away Kaufman’s most mature work, and Gondry has bought it to the big screen with a newfound sense of restraint.

Joel is having a hard time. He’s broken up with his girlfriend Clementine, and - to his horror - she has had an operation to erase all memory of him from her mind. In a fit of pique, Joel decides to have the same procedure performed on himself. The anaesthetic isn’t so successful, though, and halfway through, Joel wakes up in his own head. Now, struck with the realisation that he doesn’t want to forget his relationship with Clementine, Joel is racing through his own memories, trying to find a place to hide her. What could be played out as a thriller instead becomes a gentle drama, with Joel, Clementine, and the other characters struggling with the ramifications of memory, loss and time.

Much has been made of Gondry’s virtuoso technique in this film. As Joel’s memory gets erased, the very buildings and people themselves disappear, segueing smoothly into another memory, and another. The fact is, though, Gondry has really reigned himself in. Gone is the manic whimsy and endless mirror-halls of his music video-clips. Faced with a finite idea, Gondry has had to deal with things disappearing instead of multiplying, and for the most part he’s very faithful to that. The camera is - if not subtle - at least very understandable, and mainly unobtrusive. There is a section in the middle that harks back - for both Gondry and Kaufman - to their earlier work, but it’s kept in check by the steadily moving narrative.

The cast themselves are all fantastic. Jim Carrey - so much better when he’s not trying to wring an Oscar out of someone - captures Joel’s confusion, sadness and also muted joy perfectly. Kate Winslet, always great, lends a typically shrill and irrational Kaufman woman a sense of appeal that she otherwise might not have. Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst and Tom Wilkinson flesh out supporting roles adroitly and no one really puts a step wrong.

Eternal Sunshine isn’t trying to say something particularly profound, but - unlike all of Kaufman’s other work - it’s subtle, and I really enjoyed not to being spoonfed. The idea of erasing our memories, is, ironically, not one that we need a machine for. Everyone can look back at moments in their past with a sense of wonder at the flood of emotions accompanying them. Indeed, everyone erases their memories to one extent or another, and watching Joel rage against the dying of the light, we can also empathise with that. The film, for the most part, is played as an elegy to forgetting. Joel and the other characters - unlike most of us - are confronted by their own subjectivity, and the gulf is a wide one.

And yet, the film isn’t pessimistic. There is an implication here that there are some things we can’t forget, and some things we should, too. Listening afresh to tapes that they can’t remember recording, we share the protagonists’ sense of horror because emotions shouldn’t be set in stone, it’s just not human. In keeping the focus narrow - inside of one man’s head - Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind becomes something surprisingly simple, elegant and emotional. Ignoring the culture he seems to detest so much has left Kaufman with something better: humanity. Here’s hoping it stays in his work.

PS.
Patrick and I disagree on the ending. I reckon they get back together and give it a second shot. Which is strange because he's more of a romantic than I am.