Some movies you just watch; some you have to find your way into. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is both, in the sense that just watching it can leave you puzzled and frustrated for long stretches of time, yet sitting it out is the only real way to realize what it's up to and how.
The film begins with a man (Jim Carrey) waking up. Waking up doesn't seem a terribly happy experience for him. His bed and what we see of his apartment - a functional shelter and hidey-hole somewhere on the rim of the greater New York City area - are messy, rumpled, steeped in shadows that are not so much movie-glamorous as coagulated gloom.
He has some kind of work to go to, and heads out to catch his commuter train. It's Valentine's Day, his voiceover tells us, a holiday invented by the greeting-card industry "to make you feel like crap." Feeling like crap, he impulsively lunges away from the commuter platform, down some steps and into (not quite through) the closing doors of another train, one bound for the farthest reaches of Long Island. That would be the Hamptons and Montauk, a remote point where an odd little man in "The Great Gatsby" once took a photograph of a gull.
Out on the island, on a bleak platform curtained by falling snow that mostly obliterates the outlines of the known world, he realizes that he is not alone. A strange, not-altogether-unpretty girl with blue hair (Kate Winslet) tries to catch his attention as persistently as he tries to pretend he isn't pretending not to notice her. Eventually they are returning cityward on the same train. She either wants to flirt with him or is working up to attack him. The possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
Thus begins the relationship, the romance, the whatever-it-is, of Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski. It lasts through an elliptical series of quirky interactions in shared isolation until one day Joel reads a card advising him that Clementine has erased him from her memory and asking that he please not attempt to contact her.
His first encounter with her after the reading the card, at the bookstore where she works, finds her acting as if he were just another anonymous customer - someone not nearly as interesting as the faceless guy (there's a bookstand in the way from Joel's point-of-view) she seems to be kissing. Is this a put-on? For, truth to tell, Clementine's behavior is neither more nor less crazy- and/or manipulative- and/or perverse-seeming that what we have come to regard as her normal way of being.
Clearly there's only one thing to do. Two (at least) can play that game. And so Joel betakes himself to lacunainc.com, the company named on the card, to have his memory purged of Clementine and all she touched. Before long, Joel is supine in bed, a helmet that might have been borrowed from the False Maria in "Metropolis" fastened to his head, while three technicians (Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst and Elijah Wood) in the employ of the fubsy Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) set about erasing the edifice of his past.
This is where (when?) most of the movie takes place, although the images and events we witness range ever more widely, in ever more disjointed and ambiguous patterns, than in the movie pre-erasure procedure. Soon we have to wonder: is it pre? Where (when?), really, did the movie begin, and what end is it careening toward? And yes, the elaborate meet-cute of the film's opening sequence almost certainly wasn't the beginning of the relationship/romance/whatever. It may even be a kind of end. Or the opening of unsuspected possibilities that accumulate greater and greater desperation as we really get to know these raddled modern lives, and as big pieces of Joel and the universe start disappearing.
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (the phrase is Alexander Pope's) was directed by Michel Gondry, who has mostly trafficked in music videos. This is one time when even a case-hardened auteurist finds it more useful to locate authorship in the screenwriter of the film: Charlie Kaufman.
Kaufman is the dauntingly ingenious, one-of-a-kind writer of "Being John Malkovich" (1999), a deadpan fantasia in which various characters are serially transported into the mind of actor John Malkovich (who played himself); "Adaptation." (2002), the best original screenplay and the best, uh, adaptation of its year, whose main character was "Being John Malkovich" screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage); and "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (2002), a biopic of "Gong Show" host-creator Chuck Barris, who also claims to have been a CIA operative and hitman. (Non-auteurists and non-Kaufmaniacs may point out, understandably, that Jim Carrey starred in a 1998 film, "The Truman Show," as the lifelong star of a television series in whose encyclopedically artificial microcosm he resided, unaware that he was the only nonfiction element in range. However, that would be a red herring.)
In the course of viewing and re-viewing-in-progress the myriad of incidents, details, spaces, intersections and overlaps that make up "Eternal Sunshine," we come to realize that, however dazzling and ingenious the game that the film is playing, it's a game played for keeps. The quasi-science fiction intricacies, mirror reflections, visions and revisions that are so intellectually stimulating to track also take on flesh-and-blood urgency. In rebelling against the erasure they themselves have signed on for, Joel and Clementine are really coming up against the need to break with their solipsistic, dead-end and dead-ending demands for having it their way and demanding that others have it that way, too. Nobody lives happily ever after. But everybody lives, if they give themselves a chance.
This kaleidoscopic, ultimately moving picture is a chance. Take it.[[In-content Ad]]
