Often, when Jim Carrey plays it straight, all of the vitality is drained from his face; he looks like a root- canal patient trying out a pleasant expression for his oral surgeon. In Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- a title that will frustrate ushers trying to abbreviate it for marquees -- Carrey finally understands that he needn't cut a character off from pleasure, and so his Joel Barish is serious rather than anestheticized. But this angular and intelligent romantic comedy isn't entirely consistent. Even as you laugh, it's a movie you admire more than love.
Gondry, displaying an impressively quicksilver, scrambling technique, doesn't exactly seem to be listening to his actors. You can almost hear him shouting at the gathered crowds just outside the camera frame. It helps that he is working with a much better script than he had for Human Nature, his previous collaboration with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman has spent more time cataloging -- and sending up -- American bourgeois pettiness and immaturity than any screenwriter going.
One of the funniest things about Kaufman is that all of his filmed scripts -- Being John
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Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation and now Sunshine -- sound like titles from REM's Reckoning. (The title actually comes from a poem by Alexander Pope -- or as one of the characters calls him, "Pope Alexander.")
The mournful, paranoid quality of Eternal Sunshine, which opens nationwide today, especially brings to mind REM's South Central Rain: "The city on the river, there's a girl without a dream," which turns out to be literally true later in this film for Clem (Kate Winslet). Clem is the brash, loquacious bookstore employee who meets Joel (Carrey) as he wanders the streets alone on Valentine's Day -- a self-consciously poignant conceit if ever there was one. The two of them fall in love under a glum, flannel cloud cover that could use some eternal sunshine.
With her streaks of cobalt-blue hair, Clem has the look of one of those Barnes & Noble information-counter girls whose eyes haze over with contempt if you aren't asking for help finding Thomas Pynchon -- or Charlie Kaufman. Winslet precisely limns the neurotic assertiveness that makes someone like Clem seem less attractive every time she opens her mouth, yet she also projects the charm of someone who needs to be heard.
Gondry and the superlative cinematographer Ellen Kuras mock the title by setting the film in a wintry suburban New York and using as many available light sources as possible. A shot of Joel and Clem flat on their backs on a frozen lake is an awe-inspiring piece of visual magic, both romantic and conceptual; they'd both like to freeze the moment. It also captures the differences between the two; Clem had to coerce Joel out of his shell, and he doesn't bother to cloak his resentment until he joins her.
Joel's growing infatuation with Clem is bruised when he finds that she's had all memories of him erased from her mind. Devastated, he goes to the inventor of the process, Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), for the same treatment. When the heart-sick Joel asks if the procedure causes brain damage, Dr. Mierzwiak replies, "Technically, it is brain damage."
Kaufman sets much of the film's second half at Joel's apartment, where the technicians Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood) are giving Joel's mind a Clem-bake, eliminating all traces of her.
The inspiration for Sunshine, seems to be Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day, which -- like any great movie -- gains in stature as time passes. Where Bill Murray dominated that film -- and its accomplishment seemed overshadowed because he bestrode the picture like a giant -- Sunshine is filled with a group of outsize selfish folks whose minor-league brattiness makes the second half of the film funny and ugly.
Stan obviously doesn't have respect for professionalism; he trashes Joel's apartment when his co-worker, Mary (Kirsten Dunst), joins him. Patrick falls for Clem while dry-cleaning Joel's memories, and takes advantage of his position.
Joel, slightly cognizant of the intruders in his home while he's under, experiences the waking nightmare we've all had, dreaming of the room we've dozed off in and trying to rouse ourselves from sleep. In the meantime, the heartache-cleansing process is stealing away all of his beloved -- and painful -- times with Clem.
This entire section is breathtakingly realized, melting several bad dreams into one and Gondry's swift, improvised direction bleaches the portentousness from the conception.
It succeeds so completely that we understand why the director's music videos -- especially his work with Bjork and the White Stripes -- work so well. He can define contradictory emotions with extraordinary clarity and alacrity. It's why he's so suited to handling much of this particular Kaufman script.
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