Joyous Recall

How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways... uh...

by Michael Sean McGowan

Things are as they are.  There is no past unchanged.  No memory undone.

    -Michael McGowan, Empire Town

    This isn't the case with Clementine Kruczynski.  Hardly a year after she first met Joel Barish, Clementine has had every moment of her relationship with him wiped.  When he walks into a Barnes and Noble on Valentine's Day to give her a please-forgive-me gift, he finds her taking him in with a blank stare, indifferent attitude, and another young man she makes sweet eyes at.

    In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the relationship between Joel and Clementine is not one of stock Hollywood set, but one that, almost shamefully, seems to ping on real life with deadly accuracy.  They don't fall in love at first sight; in fact, it might be arguable to say they don't fall in love at all, at least not in the swept-off-the-feet-Gone-with-the-Wind way of thinking of the term.  At first Joel, who is so shy, so introverted even his voice-over thoughts seem whispered and embarrassed, is a little bit put off, maybe even frightened by a spitfire like Clementine.  She immediately confesses that she changes her hair color to fit her mood (as the film progresses she looks like a slowly evolving Crayola box) and  her attitude seems to take demolition-derby hairpin brakes and turns.  Clementine isn't shy about how she feels about Joel's coyness; it seems to intrigue her and nauseate her in turns that could be clocked on a stopwatch.

    How two people like this could ever grow to love each other is a great mystery, but not in a way that disparages the film.  A few months ago in my review to Welcome to Mooseport I wrote..."the movie really strains when it tries to convince us that there can be any connection between three characters (Romano, Hackman, and Tierney) who not only do not seem right for each other, but you couldn't even imagine them waiting in line at the same restaurant."  The problem there were stock characters who were thrown into a love triangle dictated by the plot.  Joel's and Clementine's situation is far different.  I don't understand what they see in each other, but I do believe they can fall in love.  I believe enigmas like this happen everyday.

    It's one harsh argument following a build-up of resentment (which we see in reverse later in the film) that sends Clementine off to Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, whose office (called Lacuna Inc.) seems as risk-free as a dentist's, to have memories of Joel zapped right out of her grey matter (the same idea was used in John Woo's Paycheck, but here, without the sci-fi gloss, seems far more insidious).  Learning that he's been replaced by huge gaps of dead-time, Joel decides to one-up Clementine and get her erased, as well.  "Is there any danger of brain damage?" Joel asks.  "Well, technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage," Mierzwiak replies.

    From here, Eternal Sunshine takes on a surrealist bend as most of the film plays out inside Joel's own mind as he watches, in third person, his memories being blanched out and washed away (the process through which this is done, signs suddenly going blank during moments of foreground attention, will make for fine slow-mo viewing on DVD).  But as the potholes in Joel's Clementine Road begin to get smoothed over, he realizes that there are true gems hidden inside.  The night they watched the stars while laying on the surface of a frozen lake.  The orange sweatshirt he first saw her in.  So blinded by his own anger and despair, Joel realizes that he can't strip away the bad without taking the good, too.  It's all a package deal.

    I was one of the few who wasn't exactly impressed with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's debut, the 1999 surprise hit Being John Malkovich.  Clever idea and all, feeding people through a tunnel that lead right into the mind of John Malkovich and then proceeded to dump them out along the New Jersey Freeway, but the movie felt like a Gimmick Piece.  Once its cleverness was trotted out and used, it seemed to have nothing else to do.  And the people the story concerned, colorful maybe, were still slaves to the who jury-rigged circus-feel of it.  However, last year's brilliant Adaptation gave us Kaufman's trademark reality twist, but by placing a sweet, vulnerable character (himself) in the center, made it involving.  Kaufman scores equally here.  Eternal Sunshine may be a mind-job of a film, but it is one with a surprising amount of heart.  The story belongs to Joel and Clementine, not Lacuna or Dr. Mierzwiak.  Once Joel realizes that he's in danger of losing her forever, he tries desperately to smuggle her, "hide" her in deeper recesses of his psyche, resulting in the most droll visual sequences of the film.

    As far as Jim Carrey, who plays Joel with the amps turned way down, I like him movies like Bruce Almighty just fine; however he has a knack for communicating the silent frustrations in every introvert.  In Man on the Moon he made the late comedian Andy Kaufman a man haunted by an incessant need to please others while his methods were programmed to repulse.  In the still-classic (at least in my book) Truman Show, his Truman Burbank was a symbol for every one of us who have felt like we were trapped in a video game, pursuing meager rewards in an incoherent environment for someone else's entertainment.  Here, as Clementine describes him, Joel is a "nice" guy, but still (or maybe even more likely) prone to fits of lashing out.  There isn't a beat of this performance that Carrey gets wrong.  Set perfectly next to him, Kate Winslet make's Clementine's eccentricities look ingrained and not like a mediocre screenwriter's attempt to add "color."

    There are some subplots, notably involving the assistants of Dr. Mierzwiak.  One of them, Patrick (Elijah Wood) has taken advantage of Joel's loss and has placed himself in the empty space he left behind in Clementine's head.  Then there is Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Mary (Kirsten Dunst) who are involved in a relationship that I won't define further.  All of these feel like add-ons and while they echo Kaufman's central theme, that perhaps love invades parts of us too deep to simply be exterminated or extracted, they come off as simple distracters.

    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of the first bursts of creativity in an otherwise banal year.  Even with its faults (which are few in number) it is creative, funny, and most of all sweet.  It is less about its aberrant Tom Foolery than it is about capturing a Polaroid of what love is, and what it can become if we don't accept it for what it is... nothing.  A-