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Sunshine Carreys the day
BY PETER KEOUGH
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Directed by Michel Gondry. Written by Charlie Kaufman. With Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, and Elijah Wood. A Focus Features release (110 minutes). At the Boston Common, the Fenway, the Fresh Pond, and the West Newton and in the suburbs.
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At their best, Charlie Kaufman’s films not only are about the mind, they make you use it, too. Hence the failure of Michel Gondry’s sophomoric and obvious Human Nature and the enduring mystery and delight of Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. Jonze’s Adaptation falls somewhere between the two. Directed by Gondry with a visual inventiveness and kinetic exuberance that recalls more his outstanding music video work than his leaden Nature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — a true headscratcher starting with the title — is the best of them all. Twenty minutes into the film, when the credits first kick in, the questions remain: where are we? when are we? who are we? What is remembered and what is now and what is both? Through everything, the hope that it will all make sense and the dread that it never will both persevere. Sunshine opens with the ultimate unreliable voiceover narrator as Joel (Jim Carrey) reflects on why he had a sudden impulse while on the way to work to race over (Carrey’s manic sprint here is the only time he breaks into physical comedy in a masterfully repressed performance) to the next track to jump on a departing train to Montauk. There he walks the snow-blinded beach and spots another wanderer, Clementine (Kate Winslet, both irresistible and insufferable in her best performance), hunched in an orange-hooded sweatshirt. They keep bumping into each other, at a coffee shop and on the train back. She thinks she knows him. She’s aggressive and drinks from a nip bottle and is a bit goofy. He notes in voiceover that his social life suffers from his inability to look attractive women in the eye. Somehow, he finds himself in her apartment, and it looks like the beginning of a bruising, doomed relationship between two misfits who desperately need each other and will never get along. Or is it the end? Later, Joel meets another stranger (Elijah Wood) who accosts him out of nowhere, demanding, "What are you doing here?" It seems like one of those random encounters one has with the confused and deranged, an absurdist fillip in a film from a screenwriter with a flair for such oddities, and Joel shakes it off. The stranger, however, is Patrick, an employee of Lacuna, a service that erases the memories of ex-flames from their estranged lovers. Where and when and with whom Lacuna steps in with Joel and Clementine is a minor part of Sunshine’s mystery. Like the work of Philip K. Dick (comparisons between Sunshine and the hapless Dick adaptation Paycheck are instructive), the film taps into the suspicion that the world is a figment manipulated by evil and ubiquitous powers. It also bolsters the hope that memory, identity, and love can withstand those powers. Or maybe not. The course of both the protagonists’ love and the filmmakers’ project faces snags, obstacles, paradoxes and implausibilities. For their part, Kaufman and Gondry fare well. Unlike the bogus and contrived achronology of 21 Grams, the time line and the point of view resolve themselves with seeming flawlessness (a second or fifth viewing might be called for), with clues to continuity ranging from Clementine’s hair color ("Agent Orange" to "Blue Ruin" and shades in between) to Joel’s memory of a line from the late-’50s TV cartoon show Huckleberry Hound. And Gondry surpasses even Jonze in Malkovich in re-creating the funhouse of the subconscious, using effects with origins going back to the films of Georges Méliès and illusionist theater. As the lumpen Lacuna technicians, distracted by their own hills of beans, by munchies, beer, and marijuana, or motivated by their own lonely and unethical agendas, pursue a targeted memory that does not want to die through a labyrinth of neurons, the images and transitions become disorienting, hilarious, and terrifying. More important, the filmmakers don’t just create a puzzle that begs to be solved, they also compose a metaphysical poem that delights in the evanescence of experience and mourns it, a poem that ponders the solitude of the individual and finds it pitiable and immense. Joel and Clementine’s chances of making it don’t look good (the film ends with a resolution worthy of Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot), but their struggle is worth remembering.
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