Michel Gondry hit his stride with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Human Nature, his first attempt at narrative long-form filmmaking, was a series of beautiful illusions that never really cohered. Unlike his mentor, Spike Jonze, Gondry seemed uncomfortable dealing with actors, garnering colorful but one-dimensional performances from Patricia Arquette and Tim Robbins. Brush all those memories aside, though, because the hallucinogenic quality of Gondry’s music videos perfectly melds with his seemingly fleeting attention span throughout Eternal Sunshine, where his faults as a storyteller are directly tied to the film’s strengths.
Written by Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine is less meta than Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. but more reality-bending than your average Philip K. Dick sci-fi procedural. Introverted nice guy Joel (Jim Carrey) hears of an experimental procedure to erase troubling memories and dives right in when his impulsive girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), washes her brain entirely clean of their love-shattered relationship. As kindly Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson, whose bedside manner and medical detachment is both comforting and dark) and his geek-chic trio of assistants (Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood) put Joel through erasure, the bottom falls out of the film.
Washed-out realism gives way to vivid surrealism, and the labyrinth of Joel’s mind becomes an awe-inspiring collage of mad visions. Joel and Clementine race through self-obliterating—and distinctly Bergman-esque—evocations of a deteriorating relationship and find themselves in apartments crossed with seascapes, larger-than-life Alice in Wonderland kitchens, Escher-like bending walls, and Francis Bacon mutations. Joel’s memories go backward in time from the last gasp of their love to their initial spark, but there are sideways detours along the way that take him to infancy and memories of his first childhood humiliation. James Joyce might have applauded this caustically Dickian and Gnostic rendition of his “Nighttown” from Ulysses, with Clementine as Joel’s face-changing Penelope/Molly Bloom.
Gondry is an astute and clever technical maestro, and Eternal Sunshine is rich with choreographic invention. It helps that he’s working from Kaufman’s most humane script. Where Adaptation.’s touching scenes between Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper’s characters were undermined by so much meta gobbledygook, the doomed romance between Joel and Clementine is Eternal Sunshine’s narrative backbone, even as Kaufman errs on the side of the clinical and aloof. He can’t help writing clever, which is fine, but that often leaves characters stranded like chess pieces. That said, there’s a depth and multilayered believability to the refreshingly low-key Carrey (playing the role for drama, not slapstick) and the high-energy Winslet (in a performance as wild as her character’s ever-switching hair color).
As the highs and lows of Joel and Clementine’s relationship blip across the screen, sometimes jumping across timelines from the beginning to the end of their relationship in mid-scene, Kaufman tosses in nimble subplots involving Dr. Mierzwiak and his assistants. Duplicitous and lovestruck Patrick (Wood) has stolen Joel’s memories and is attempting to use them to get into Clementine’s pants, and a bizarre unrequited love triangle forms between Stan (Ruffalo), Mary (Dunst), and Dr. Mierzwiak. Perversions of memory inevitably follow, and Eternal Sunshine begins to contemplate how many of its characters have had bad memories scrubbed clean—how many times, and whether that destroys essential parts of who they are.
Eternal Sunshine is a comedy that has the bracing fright of an identity-crisis horror film. The initial 15 minutes, showing Joel and Clementine meeting for the “first” time and having an attraction they can’t put their finger on, isn’t played cute. They’re both so fried from off-screen memory wipes that they’ve lost most aspects of their personality. It’s an initial note of sweetness and despair as the lost souls attempt to reconnect, and it says something that Gondry and Kaufman don’t rush headlong into their subsequent fantasia. What’s more to the point is their great premise eventually runs out of steam, and like many a Philip K. Dick novel they have a hell of a time wrapping things up at the climax. Eternal Sunshine is too muddled to be considered a masterpiece, but Gondry’s naked cinematic ambition goes a long way here.
Joel attempts to fight the erasure of his memories, and Eternal Sunshine admits early on that it’s a fight he cannot win. That he keeps on fighting anyway is the crux of the film, and a breakthrough for Kaufman—writing about the human condition more than questioning our lives as self-made fictions. The fantasies here are more “real” than anything that Kaufman has ever written, because they define who we think we are. Joel rediscovers his love for Clementine through fantasy, which is to say through his clouded memories of her. Such things are precious, and Gondry revels in that world in all its fleeting, flickering, ever-mutating joys.
Image/Sound
This DVD edition of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. The film’s vibrant color palette, from Kate Winslet’s Manic Panic-colored hair and wigs to the patterned quilt in her bedroom, are most vivid in daylight scenes as well as in Joel’s kaleidoscopic memories. Edge enhancement is noticeable in spots, especially during the dream beach scenes, but if the backgrounds are strange and the actors look as if they are cardboard cut-outs, blame it on the day-for-night filter Gondry appears to have used for these sequences. The film’s sound design is a complex one, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Dolby Digital surround track is powerfully inundating at times.
Extras
For such an inventive film, this Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind DVD is rather straightforward. Included here are two un-extraordinary featurettes, the ten-minute “A Look Inside Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which, with a mix of junket and on-set interviews (including cast member Mark Ruffalo and his crazy, amazing hairdo), is essentially an extended trailer for the film, and the slightly longer and in-depth “A Conversation with Jim Carrey and Director Michel Gondry,” which finds the actor and filmmaker sitting in what appears to be a grammar school band room reminiscing on the making of the film. The pair discuss, among other things, the simplicity of the technique used in the kitchen flashback scene. In fact, an entire feature-length documentary detailing the use of dimensions, secret exits, extras, and editing (and lack of actual “special effects”) to create the memory sequences in the film-topics that are only briefly discussed here-would have made a valuable extra. The sole commentary included here features Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who discuss their collaborative effort on the film. If you can get past the director’s accent, there are a few stories of particular note, but you’re better off spending your time with the commentary audio off, discovering the nuances of multiple viewings on your own. Other extras include four deleted scenes (sans commentary-blah!), the music video for The Polyphonic Spree’s “Light & Day,” and the Lacuna commercial.
Overall
The DVD for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is rather pedestrian, but luckily the film is extraordinary enough to stand on its own.
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