Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind  

  

Directed by Michel Gondry

 

Written by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth   (story)

And Charlie Kaufman   (screenplay)

 

Starring: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst

 

Rated R for language, some drug and sexual content

108 minutes runtime

USA Release: March 19, 2004

 

An excellent, if arduous, offering from the master of physical comedy, Jim Carrey and modern writer par-excellence Charlie Kaufman.  But before you get your hopes up, this is not a comedy, but a serious love story involving Carrey, his troubled but attractive paramour, Kate Winslet, and a dubious doctor played, to the hilt, by Tom Wilkinson.  If there is any humor, it is of the blackest kind, and accessible only to those who try hard.

 

Kate and Jim meet on a cold and wind-swept winter day on Long Island, where Jim’s Joel Barish is wont to play hooky when he feels the need to clear his mind (no pun intended).  He spends his time roaming the frozen beaches and making doodles of scenes on a pad of paper that always seems to be at hand.  Joel is very shy, but Kate’s Clementine Kruczynski comes on to him like there is no tomorrow (or no yesterday) and a romance is born.  But what starts as just another boy-meets-girl romp migrates towards the bizarre as Clementine inexplicably dumps Joel like a hot potato.  Not only does she leave him, she no longer acknowledges him as a human being.  Doesn’t know him from Adam.  No such number, no such phone. 

 

Clementine, always impetuous, has had her brain laser-vacuumed with a new computerized process pioneered by the somewhat shaky Dr. Howard Mierzwiak in his upstairs office in Soho (long known as a center of cutting edge medical research in New York City).  To repeat, this movie is not a comedy, but a serious drama about giving away part of a person’s humanity to escape the past.  A Faustian contract to be sure, and never played more Faustian than by Tom Wilkinson as the good Dr. Mierzwiak.  Never will you see a better performance of the devil with a nervous twitch than Wilkinson provides in this movie.  Mierzwiak vacillates between being in complete control and being completely out of control, a victim of his own technology; doomed to answer to his karma whether his laser likes it or not.

 

Through a chance circumstance, Joel Barish learns of the mysterious doctor and his apparent connection to his quirky dumper Clementine.  He goes into the building (right next door to the Little Shop of Horrors) and confronts Mierzwiak with his suspicions.  Learning the truth of the matter, Joel vows revenge and, like any red-blooded male, insists on having his own memories erased as well.  If she thinks she can laser dump him and go on with her own life like he never existed, she’s got another think coming.  Or one less think coming, depending on how you look at it.  As the doctor explains the process of swatting bad memories out of the brain like so many flies on the kitchen counter, Barish asks, “Is there any chance of brain damage?”  To which Mierzwiak answers, “Well, technically speaking, it IS brain damage…but it’s on a par with a night of heavy drinking.”  This explains the Soho location of the office.

 

As it turns out, the memory zapping will be carried out by the doctor’s trusted assistant, Stan, played by Mark Ruffalo, with a more-or-less straight face at this point in the movie.  Stan looks like a teenager more adept at playing computer games than performing brain surgery, and the “operation” itself actually uses computer screens from the old video game Missile Attack superimposed on a cerebral cat-scan.  Kudos to Gondry on this one, Ruffalo’s performance is perfect.

 

When the operation doesn’t go quite as planned, the movie launches into a spinning delirium of half memories that spans a year or so of Joel’s and Clementine’s shared life experiences; although this year may seem an eternity for unprepared members of the audience.  Indeed, several in my audience chose to take leave of the combination of “The Matrix,” “Memento,” “Mulholland Drive” and “Run Lola Run,” that makes up this cinematic experience.  The camera is all over the place, as is the sound.  Buildings crack and morph and streets dissolve as the actors run away from the computer driven laser scanning memory centers.  The scenes come at you like fastballs and recovery from one is hardly possible before the next is in your face.

 

Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay for this movie and was also the man responsible for the excellent, if eccentric, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “Adaptation,” and “Being John Malkovich.”  Anybody who saw “John Malkovich” knows that Kaufman is not a man constrained by conventional notions of time and space, and French director Michel Gondry seems to fit Kaufman’s story lines hand-in-glove.  The resulting collaboration of the two is remarkable.  Although bordering on the strident, this bold step forward in the nonlinear uses the power of film to take the audience out of the every day and into the inner-most feelings of human emotion.  Leaving order in the dust, the movie cuts right to the pain and glory of love, and at the same time looks at the dualistic nature of good and bad emotions and how the good exists only in relation to the bad.

 

An excellent performance as well by Elijah Wood (Frodo no more) as Patrick, an employee of Dr. Mierzwiak who has also lost his way in the moral chaos of laser brain-washing.  Seizing the opportunity to capitalize on Clementine’s lost memories; Patrick is drawn into a pathetic scheme to steal Joel’s memory and Clementine’s heart at the same time.  In the end, he and good doctor have only the memories of their own cowardice and inability to face life’s demons and temptations.  Kirsten Dunst, in a good, if short, appearance, is Dr. Mierzwiak’s bad memory that just won’t go away.

 

If you saw the glimmer of genius in the 2001 collaboration of Kaufman and Gondry, “Human Nature,” or if you liked Jim Carrey’s previous “serious” movie, “The Truman Show,” you owe it to yourself to check out “Spotless Mind.”