Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Review  

The films written by Charlie Kaufman take off from such twisted premises that they deserve an alternate grading system -- perhaps one to four bottles of absinthe. A bleak moral comedy about a back door into actor John Malkovich's head? A book adaptation that splits its screenwriter into dysfunctional twins, one artistic and one a sell-out? The wonder is that such splendid mutations make it out of Hollywood story meetings and onto the screen.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" -- the title is from Alexander Pope -- also proceeds from a notion that by now must be called Kaufmanesque. It's a smaller notion, though, and it suggests that the screenwriter is starting to repeat himself. Remember the scene in "Being John Malkovich" in which Cameron Diaz and Catherine Keener chased each other through the levels of the title actor's mind? Imagine that sequence expanded to feature length and you've got something very close to "Eternal Sunshine," which locks itself into the hall of mirrors that is the memory of Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and rarely comes up for air.

Unlike "Malkovich" or "Adaptation," "Eternal" is not directed by Spike Jonze but by the French music-video enfant terrible Michel Gondry (Bjork, the White Stripes), who made an in-your-face misfire out of Kaufman's script for "Human Nature" (2001). "Eternal" is a big improvement over that film but it's still too self-absorbed to fully connect with an audience.

I should also issue the consumer advisory that the Jim Carrey on display here is not the rubber-faced, alrighty-then Carrey that the masses know and love. This is the art-film Carrey: repressed, lovesick, unshaven. Essentially he's doing the same intellectual sad sack played by John Cusack in "Malkovich" and Nicolas Cage in "Adaptation" (and apparently by Kaufman whenever he looks in the mirror). Carrey tamps it down further into pathos, though, and he's affecting and, when you least expect it, quite funny. This is the most quietly serious work the star has done yet.

Joel is in love with Clementine (Kate Winslet), a free-spirited Barnes & Noble clerk with a penchant for Blue Ruin hair dye. Clementine was also in love with Joel for a few years, until she was not, at which point she went to the downtown offices of a company called Lacuna Inc. and had her memories of her ex-boyfriend erased. The technicians perform the operation while you sleep; when asked if there's risk of brain damage, inventor Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) replies, "technically, the procedure is brain damage."

Betrayed, Joel signs up for the same treatment: if Clementine won't have him in her head, he won't have her in his. Except that halfway through the erasure, he changes his mind -- or, rather, tries not to change his mind. There's a blithe Pac-Man frenzy to the ensuing scenes: Joel and the Clementine that lives in his memory scamper to parts of his brain where the machines aren't programmed to look, such as childhood recollections (cue Carrey in outsize PJs) or adolescent humiliations.

Outside Joel's mind, the Lacuna staff are experiencing technical difficulties of their own. Having set up their equipment in the subject's bedroom, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood) kick back and raid the refrigerator. Their fun is spoiled by the appearance of Mary (Kirsten Dunst), the ambitious company receptionist, and ultimately by the arrival of Dr. Mierzwiak. What starts as a goofy sideshow to the main event turns into the film's most tragicomic aspect, with Ruffalo and Dunst doing heartbreaking work and Wood taking a break from Frodo with a deft little turn as a slacker jerk.

Once it establishes the inner reality of Joel's struggle, though, "Eternal Sunshine" hits the same notes over and over, with dazzling visual tricks that offer diminishing returns. Kaufman is a stone genius at both concept and the telling detail -- I loved the weeping patient clutching a dog bowl in the Lacuna offices -- but he needs a cold-blooded prankster like Jonze to tether his imagination to shared reality. Gondry, by contrast, is too busy putting on a show to keep the film from disappearing up its own hindquarters.

Does a real Clementine even exist? Yes, and she's not quite as nice as the one in Joel's head. Never a vain actress to begin with, Winslet plays the character with the bullying sense of melodrama certain young women mistake for creative expression, but she's so clearly kin to Keener's castrating ubervixen in "Malkovich" that one wonders if Kaufman wouldn't be better taking his issues with women to the couch instead of the multiplex.

Nah.

Besides, Joel loves Clementine, the way we sometimes love people who may not be entirely good for us. The movie respects that, even as it insists that what we call "love" has as little to do with its object as a plastic drawing sheet has to do with the wax tablet beneath it. Lift the sheet, erase the drawing, warns this hectic, muffled, maddeningly near-brilliant movie, and we risk destroying all we may ever really know of someone else.



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