Broken Heart

Memories are made of this: Winslet and Carrey survey the damage.

Eternal Sunshine's fractured, melancholy romance is the real thing.

by Sam Adams

Unlike the other movies made from Charlie Kaufman’s scripts, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn’t drop its themes on your doorstep like a cat with a dead mouse. The closest the movie gets to a statement of purpose is a half-finished sentence, and even then, it comes across as an incidental detail. As lovers Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) quarrel in the forest, sneak a peak at the legend on her T-shirt: "Love is Ö " Considering Kaufman’s obvious antipathy to cliche, it’s a shock to see him approaching the idea of romance, even with a pair of oven mitts. But, for once, it’s not the word "love" that’s most important, but the three dots that follow it, suggesting possibility and ambivalence at the same time.

Eternal Sunshine is a love story, but a love story in reverse. Clementine and Joel fall for each other in the first 10 minutes, and then, all of a sudden, Joel is mourning her loss: One second she's fetching her toothbrush, the next he's sobbing uncontrollably behind the wheel of his car. There's plenty of precedent for this odd-sock couple, the shy guy and the extravagant, moody girl, but Carrey and Winslet renew the moment of falling in love as only movie stars can. When the love that's just blossomed is abruptly crushed, it's like being broadsided by a cement truck.

When Joel shows up at the bookstore where Clementine works, she looks at him as if they've never met -- and in a sense, they haven't. (If you want to preserve the movie's surprises, stop reading now.) Instead of not returning Joel's phone calls, Clementine has hired a company calld Lacuna (another name for those three dots) to wipe all memory of him from her mind. No muss, no fuss.

Needless to say, this throws Joel for something of a loop, and after some soul-searching, he decides to erase Clementine as well. In fact, we start to realize, he's already made the decision: We've been watching his memories, which are being erased before our eyes.

For all the praise lavished on Kaufman's Being John Malkovich and Adaptation (both directed by Spike Jonze), they were more knowing than smart, flattering audiences and critics for their supposed sophistication without actually challenging them in meaningful ways. Their self-awareness verges on solipsism. Eternal Sunshine's Michel Gondry gives Kaufman's conceits weight and form, tethering them to earth. Joel's erased memories don't evaporate; they crumble and sag, pucker and dissolve. "Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage," says Lacuna's Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), "but it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking." As the process further ravages Joel's psyche, we get a sense of the hangover to come: half-empty memories cluttered with debris, lit like a scene from Cops, as if Joel is an outlaw in his own mind.

Though Gondry makes sparing use of digital effects, most of his tricks are accomplished in-camera, or through simple stagecraft. As Joel tells two friends about Clementine's failure to recognize him, the film conventionally cuts away to their encounter at the bookstore. But as Joel wraps up the story, he walks through the bookstore and right into his friends' living room, traversing time and space as effortlessly as Anton Walbrook in La Ronde. Even before we know that both spaces exist inside of Joel's head, their physical proximity serves as an elegant metaphor for mental association: Joel's mind travels from his friends' house to the bookstore and back, and body merely follows suit.

CGI partisans talk as if digital effects have broadened filmmakers' palettes, but in practice they're invariably used for cost-cutting purposes: Cheaper to create a fake-looking army (as in the laughable Troy trailers) than pay all those extras. But computer technology can't remedy a lack of imagination, or furnish the fortuitous accidents that figure into the best artists' work. Following in the tradition of his countrymen Cocteau and Méliés (in whose company he belongs), Gondry makes the dreamlike real, so reality seems more like a dream.

With its endless slippages, Eternal Sunshine mimics the way memory works better than any movie since Sans Soleil, even if Gondry is more of a mad scientist than a film poet. Subtly but insistently, the film draws parallels between the working of memory and the techniques of moviemaking. Joel's memory of a fight with Clementine plays back as edited highlights, but the jumps in time occur without a cut: The actors step out of frame, and by the time the camera catches up with them, it's minutes or hours later. In essence, the actors are editing the scene themselves.

Such convolutions require absolute simplicity from the actors, who also include Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst and Elijah Wood. If Carrey were up to his usual tricks, Eternal Sunshine would be simply a mess. Even when he's played "normal" characters (The Majestic or The Truman Show) he's played them as a '50s-TV version of normality, all theatrical smiles and aw-shucks ingenuousness. But Joel is something new in Carrey's repertoire, a flesh-and-blood human, not a caricature. There's nothing actors fear more than being nondescript, but Joel's ostensible ordinariness forces Carrey to go beneath the skin. His best performances, in The Cable Guy and Man in the Moon, layered emotional truth under the mugging, but here Carrey drops the mask.

Similarly, the movie's complex structure frees Kaufman to do some of his simplest, most emotionally transparent writing. Adaptation's superficial autobiography in fact revealed a deep ambivalence about the authenticity of "personal" writing. Kaufman "exposed" himself through his celluloid doppelganger, but Eternal Sunshine is by far the more revealing movie -- unless you consider the fact that he sweats a lot and occasionally masturbates more important than his feelings about love.

Despite Eternal Sunshine's thinly veiled attack on romantic movie conventions, Kaufman draws on them when he needs to shorthand the progress of Clementine and Joel's relationship. Its dissolution, on the other hand, doesn't come out of any screenwriters' handbook. It takes Joel a long time to remember his fights with Clementine, and it isn't surprising he wants to bury their memory: They're as ugly, cruel and above all, petty, as any ever filmed, rivaling the shattering blowout at the end of Mike Leigh's All or Nothing. We've been rooting for our good-looking movie stars all along, but suddenly we're forced to wonder if they really might be better off forgetting each other.

Unfortunately (or perhaps not) Lacuna's procedure is an all-or-nothing affair: Either take the rough with the smooth or live a life of gray in-betweens. Even as Clementine and Joel fall in love, lying on a frozen river and staring up at the stars, the ice beneath them is riddled with cracks. Eternal Sunshine doesn't question the desire to forget, but it suggests that such erasures, whatever form they may take, cause more damage than they heal. If that applies to psychotherapy or substance abuse, it hold equally true for the Hollywood-propagated notion that couples in love never do things to each other they'd rather forget. Conventional romantic comedies type a period at the end of "Love is ," but Eternal Sunshine suggests that it never really ends.

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

Directed by Michel Gondry A Focus release Opens Friday at area theaters

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