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| Saturday, January 8, 2005 10:37 AM |
| A Few Words on a Film I Watched Last Night |
 by Fëanor |
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a short review: One of the best movies--of the year, and possibly ever.
Longer review: an extremely surreal film that is at the same time completely realistic and true, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (from here on referred to as ESSM) is superbly acted by, among others, Jim Carrey (playing it straight, thank God, as the well-educated, thoughtful, shy Joel Barish), Elijah Wood (also playing against type as a very creepy stalker-type who tries to pick up Clementine on the rebound), Kate Winslet (who somehow completely eliminated her British accent to play kooky American girl Clementine Kruczynski), and Kirsten Dunst. That weird little guy, David Cross, also has a small part as one half of a squabbling couple that Joel is friends with. The movie was written by Charlie Kaufman (thus the withdrawn, cerebral, socially defective main character) and directed by a guy I'd never heard of before named Michel Gondry. A quick look at his filmography reveals that he mainly did music videos before this film. But he was an essential element here--who best to direct a film about memory than a Frenchman? The French, after all, are traditionally experts on the subject (see Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Marcel Proust). Plus, Gondry made the decision to do most of the many amazing special effects live, in-camera, making clever use of forced perspective, editing, specially designed props, and sets with secret passageways. This gave the movie a feeling of realtiy and immediacy that would have been difficult to achieve otherwise. And when I learned, watching the extra material on the DVD, that almost none of the fantastic, surreal visuals in the film had been created in a computer, I was astounded and doubly impressed by the craftsmanship of the film.
But about the story. The premise, if you don't know it, is that Joel's impulsive girlfriend Clementine becomes tired of their relationship and decides to go to a company called Lacuna to get all of her memories of him erased. Deeply hurt and angry, Joel decides to do the very same thing.
The whole process is like a dream of what we'd like to do when a relationship ends badly. Joel gets to complain to the doctor about all the things about Clementine he didn't like, then is asked to bring to the clinic all the items in his apartment that have any association with her. He comes in with two garbage bags full of things and sits down between a large man carrying a trophy and a small old woman with reddened eyes and a cardboard box full of stuff.
Next, the technicians scan Joel's brain. Then he goes home, takes a pill to knock himself out, and the technicians come over in their van and hook him up to a computer. They go through his memories of Clementine from most recent to most distant, which means we get to see Joel and Clementine's relationship backwards, from the worst times, through the most wonderful, to the early awkward moments. Joel relives his memories as he sleeps, and watches as they dissolve and are erased around him.
But at some point (beware the spoilers in the next three paragraphs), part way through the process, when he gets back to those good memories that he'd almost forgotten, he realizes that there are some really beautiful things here that he doesn't want to lose; that he does love Clementine after all, and that even if he can't have her, he wants to keep the memory of her. There begins a strange chase; Joel grabs hold of his memory of Clementine and runs with her through his collapsing mind, trying to find some safe place to hide her. But the doctor and his technician follow close behind with their computers, tracking them down to every out of the way corner and relentlessly erasing.
At the beginning of the film, we see Joel and Clementine meet as if for the first time, by chance, on a train. What we realize part of the way through the film is that this scene takes place after they've both had the procedure; they're meeting for the first time for the second time because they've completely forgotten each other. I was blown away when I realized this. There's an important moment to watch for here, too. When Clementine tells Joel not to make any jokes about her name, like Huckleberry Hound's song, Joel has no idea what she's talking about. But during their actual first meeting, when she says the same thing, Joel immediately mentions Huckleberry Hound, which he says was his favorite toy when he was a kid. Between their two first meetings, Joel's childhood memories have been erased. Clementine had become so integral to his life, so intertwined with his experiences, that in erasing her, part of him was destroyed.
Ultimately, Clementine and Joel realize what has happened, that they grew apart, their relationship painfully collapsed, and they erased their memories of each other. But they decide to try again anyway. Clementine warns Joel that she'll fuck him up, and he just says, "Okay." She laughs; they laugh.
In love, we give each other perfect happiness, and we tear each other to pieces. The point is, living means doing both--taking the good with the bad. Our memories make us--the horrible and the wonderful.
To sum up, see the movie if you haven't. It's totally imaginative and smart and different and moving and insightful and fantastic. In other words, everything we've come to expect from mad genius Charlie Kaufman, except more cohesive and polished than Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
That's all for now. I'm nearing the end of the travel guide of imaginary places in the back of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2, so I'll have a review of that soon. Hope everybody's weekends are going well... |
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Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
