dir. Michel Gondry
Opens Fri March 19.
Hitchcock once declared, with suitable authority, that handheld camerawork was "against all the rules of cinema." One wonders how loudly the portly Englishman would have snorted at Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here is a film, directed by Michel Gondry, that not only leans heavily on a shaky lens, but rudely flouts as many other rules as it can. It begins near its end and ends a third of the way through. Its brief fits of action are unruly and absurd. Its narrator is filled with doubt, his words unreliable not just to us in the audience, but quite often to himself. And the major souls populating the film? The hero is damaged goods, his love interest a maddening flake. In other words, Hitch just might have buckled from a stroke.
Perhaps needless to say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was written by Charlie Kaufman, he of the gifted and self-loathing pen. But whereas the last Gondry/Kaufman collaboration, Human Nature, eventually crumbled under its own quirkiness (considerably helped along by the staggering blandness of Tim Robbins), Eternal Sunshine finds director and scribe fitting perfectly together. This is a film that travels far beyond most of our imaginations. It is also one of the most beautifully assembled romances you will ever see.
The film begins in a drab bedroom, where Joel (Jim Carrey) awakens one morning in a fog; kicking away his stifling sheets, he appears confused not just by his meager surroundings, but by the pajamas he's wearing. Joel is a slump of a person, a true sad sack--even as he fails to recall exactly what he has to be sad about--and Carrey's posture during these early moments perfectly sums up matters. Hunched over, looking as if he is about to collapse on himself, Joel is in shambles, which can mean only one thing: Someone has broken his heart.
As it turns out, this assumption is only partially correct; Joel is indeed heartbroken, but he may not know it yet, or he may have known it at one time but now can't remember, or he may have known, forgotten, and will remember once again. ??? Exactly--Kaufman has penciled his main character into a confused, muddled existence, and in the process he drops the audience into a fog of its own. Long stretches of Eternal Sunshine are bewildering and untrustworthy, and it's to Gondry and Kaufman's credit that the two filmmakers refrain from holding our hands; determined and patient, the film reveals itself only when it wishes to.
Joel's heartbreaker (or former heartbreaker, or soon-to-be heartbreaker) is a girl name Clementine (Kate Winslet), who lives her life teetering on the edge of personal chaos. Moody and partial to booze, Clementine first encounters Joel on a train, where she accosts him with a conversation about hair dye. This first meeting, we come to learn, is an important one, and it plays out in a deceptively awkward fashion: Joel fidgets, Clementine flirts, and the two quickly fall into a squabble. And it is in this brief fight that the conundrum of Eternal Sunshine's plot appears: A cold, annoyed reply, by Joel, to an apparently innocent question, seems already laced with history; mumbled weakly, hinting at patience lost a long time ago, the remark feels almost as if it has been delivered before.
Following this initial meeting, the expected romance blooms, but just as Eternal Sunshine begins to settle into a rhythm, Gondry and Kaufman toss the film far ahead in time, to a point beyond Joel and Clementine's breakup. At first, this maneuver is little more than confusing, but as the film continues to breathe, everything falls into place. Joel is severely wounded by the breakup and, seeking the comfort of friends, he stumbles across a disturbing bit of information: Clementine, apparently, has had everything relating to him erased from her memory. This procedure was performed at a place called Lacuna Inc., under the supervision of Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who specializes in easing the pains of recollection. Joel, furious and envious, storms into Lacuna Inc. and demands first an explanation, and then to have the procedure performed on himself as well; Dr. Mierzwiak, flustered that Joel has found out that Clementine had him erased, agrees.
Joel's procedure, performed while he is under sedation in his apartment (dressed, it should be noted, in pajamas), is overseen by two of Dr. Mierzwiak's employees: Patrick (Elijah Wood) and Stan (Mark Ruffalo). It is a procedure they have performed successfully many times--they think nothing of lighting up a blunt and raiding Joel's liquor cabinet while they see it through. But something curious happens during the routine: Joel, panicking as his recollections of Clementine begin to blur, has second thoughts, and decides to try and hide her somewhere in his memory. Chaos, of course, ensues as Joel goes "off the grid," searching for a place to stash Clementine as pieces of his memory evaporate around him, while the erasers pinpoint blotches of his brain scan for unceremonious deletion.
To reveal any more of what happens would steal the brilliance and heartbreak of watching this film from you, so I'll be as vague as possible: What occurs after Joel slips off the grid is filled with twists, knots, and lunacy, all shown with the loud pounding of a lovelorn heart beating in our ears. Eternal Sunshine is a film that, in the end, is about the foreseeable pain we all embrace when we give our heart to someone, a pain brought on by betrayal or breakup or, eventually, death. It is a pain we know lurks out there, waiting for its inevitable entrance, and that we continue to press forward with our silly pursuits despite such a threat clearly fascinates the filmmakers. The result of this fascination is a film that does what every meaningful relationship eventually does: It leaves you broken and yearning for love.
