He can’t help writing clever, which is fine, but that often leaves characters stranded like chess pieces. 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. It helps that he’s working from Kaufman’s most humane script.
Gondry is an astute and clever technical maestro, and Eternal Sunshine is rich with choreographic invention. 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. 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.
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. Washed-out realism gives way to vivid surrealism, and the labyrinth of Joel’s mind becomes an awe-inspiring collage of mad visions. 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. 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. but more reality-bending than your average Philip K. Written by Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine is less meta than Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. 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. Unlike his mentor, Spike Jonze, Gondry seemed uncomfortable dealing with actors, garnering colorful but one-dimensional performances from Patricia Arquette and Tim Robbins.
#Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind cast series#
Human Nature, his first attempt at narrative long-form filmmaking, was a series of beautiful illusions that never really cohered. Michel Gondry hit his stride with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
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