Old Yorker

  • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michel Gondry (2004)

    Charlie Kaufman’s three films as a writer-director – Synecdoche, New York (2008), Anomalisa (2015) and I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) – have paid gradually diminishing returns.  Each boasts a distinctive form and structure but Kaufman’s preoccupations have become predictable.  Melancholy, misanthropy and the horror of mortality dominate.  Any major new themes struggle to get a look in.  Around the turn of the millennium, though, he wrote a succession of inventive screenplays that, in the hands of different directors, yielded films of greater tonal variety than his own films do:  Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002); George Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002); and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  At the same time, Kaufman’s idiosyncratic signature meant that he was emerging as one of a rare breed in cinema, the writer as auteur.   

    Gondry’s movie, often described as sci-fi romantic drama but pretty well sui generis, has a clever central idea and is increasingly maddening.  The clever idea is a memory erasure procedure:  those emerging from a failed romance can pay a New York City outfit called Lacuna to have memories of their ex wiped from their brain.  The film turns maddening as the technical possibilities of the memory-wipe start to eclipse the main relationship in the film.  How much is this down to Kaufman, how much to Gondry?   To try and answer the question, it’s worth bearing in mind their CVs pre-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  This was the first film (and is still the only film) on which Kaufman shared a writing credit with others.  His is the only name on the screenplay but the ‘story’ is credited to Gondry and Pierre Bismuth, too (all three were awarded the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay).  Gondry had directed only one other feature film – Human Nature (2001), also scripted by Kaufman, which sank without trace.  Gondry was far better known (is perhaps still best known?) as a director of music videos.  In the late 1980s and beyond, these were often for the French group Oui Oui which he co-founded and whose drummer he was.  In the course of the next decade he moved into the video big time, working with, among others, Björk and even The Rolling Stones.

    What’s coming next probably betrays shameful ignorance of the art of music videos.  But it’s striking that, once the erasure process moves to centre stage, tricksy visual effects hold sway in Eternal Sunshine for quite a time.  Until this happens, Gondry has been telling us how Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) met and fell for each other.  The film’s style, from the start, is often hyperkinetic and the narrative occasionally disorienting but Gondry directs his two leads with a sure and sensitive touch.  Casting Carrey and Winslet in these roles proves highly effective.  It’s Clementine who’s the zany free spirit while Joe is the doleful (Kaufman-esque) introvert.  So Jim Carrey’s character is tentative, introspective and not at all liable to the mugging, gurning antics that made Carrey’s name and which get on plenty of viewers’ nerves (mine included).  Joel is a closed-in, pedantic fellow who struggles to function socially, let alone romantically.  Carrey’s manic qualities aren’t quite invisible but they’re fruitfully diverted – for example, in Joel’s terrific sprint from one NYC railway platform to another, as impulse compels him to take Valentine’s Day off work and catch a train to Montauk.  (He finds himself in the same carriage as Clementine.)  Kate Winslet, of course, gives emotional depth to exuberantly kooky, blue-haired Clementine (her hair’s blue in the early scenes anyway:  it changes colour later on.)  Winslet is vividly eccentric but she’s delivering much more than a turn.

    Things go wrong between Joel and Clementine.  They split up but, when he happens to find out that she underwent a procedure to lose all memory of him, Joel is so distressed that he decides to reciprocate.  According to Lacuna protocol, he records a tape on which he recalls his affair with Clementine.  Lacuna’s head honcho is Dr Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who leaves Joel’s memory-wipe in what the doctor wrongly assumes to be the safe hands of his assistants, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood).  Once the procedure on Joel’s brain is underway, Stan does drugs and has sex with Mierzwiak’s secretary, Mary (Kirsten Dunst).  Patrick sneaks out to see Clementine.  We’ve seen this young man before:  he turned up outside her apartment the morning after Clementine and Joel had spent their first, happy night together.  It emerges that the beginning of the film was far from the beginning of that relationship; and that Patrick, taking a fancy to Clementine, has used her tape recording – in which she describes the pros and cons of life with Joel – as a guide to seducing her.

    You’d guess it’s Kaufman’s rather than Gondry’s idea that the patient getting their mind cleaned, though apparently unconscious, retains the ability to react emotionally to the memories passing through, then out of, their brain.  The erasure process starts with the most recent memories; since these are painful to Joel, he’s happy to lose them.  Once it rewinds to his earlier memories of Clementine, he feels differently.  He tries to conceal Clementine in memories that didn’t actually involve her, the erasure goes haywire and Stan, who’s been otherwise engaged with Mary, can’t get it back on track.  The film also loses focus – and the strengths it had at the start.  Joel’s attempts to hide Clementine in other memories, including of his early childhood, mean that Jim Carrey, so disciplined until now, is back to his old super-wacky tricks as, wearing a kiddie outfit and miniaturised, he becomes Joel as a young boy.  As you’d expect, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst give good performances but the subplot involving their characters takes over to too great an extent.

    It’s Mary who explains the film’s title.  She tells Howard Mierzwiak, when he arrives hotfoot at Joel’s apartment to try and rescue the memory-wipe, that she’s fond of reading ‘inspirational’ famous quotes, such as:

    ‘How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!

    The world forgetting, by the world forgot:

    Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

    Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.’

    Mary attributes this to ‘Pope Alexander’ then tells herself off for sounding ‘like a dope’ by getting those names the wrong way round.  In other words, Charlie Kaufman muffles his own pride in being well read (a pride less muffled by the time he made I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)) by putting words into the mouth of a beautiful, temporarily dumb blonde.  Mary also takes this opportunity to admit to Howard that she’s in love with him.  They kiss, just in time for Howard’s wife (Deirdre O’Connell) to turn up and witness the kissing.  She furiously tells her husband to admit the truth – that Howard and Mary had an affair a while back and Mary’s memories of it were erased.

    Joel’s last memory to be wiped is of his first meeting with Clementine on a Montauk beach.  As this memory disintegrates – literally:  the beach house breaks into fragments – Clementine urges Joel to meet her again in Montauk.  (It seems that, like Joel, she didn’t want to jettison her memories entirely.)  It’s Valentine’s Day when he comes to after his treatment; as he starts his commute to work, he’s seized by the imperative to head for Montauk instead.  What we initially assumed to be their first meeting was actually a reunion.  Gondry now replays highlights of the couple’s visit to the frozen Charles River in Boston.  In the meantime, Mary, appalled by how Lacuna operates, steals patients’ records and tapes and mails them out.  Joel and Clementine are hardly less appalled by their unhappy memories of each other.  But they decide to try to rebuild their relationship.

    It’s a relief that Eternal Sunshine regains momentum in the closing stages.  Joel and Clementine’s reconciliation may seem a minor victory and their future together may be uncertain but the film’s ending feels emotionally truthful.  The finale is some recognition too of risks inherent in the Lacuna programme:  a memory-wipe-ee could find out from a third party what has happened to them; an individual’s or a couple’s romantic destiny may dictate that history repeats itself; you could start again and go wrong again.  In retrospect, Jon Brion’s score, as used in the early stages, is very right:  the music seems to be going its own way, as if to suggest that what’s on the screen is far from the whole story.  Despite Michel Gondry’s visual pyrotechnics, Ellen Kuras’s cinematography often has an appealingly raw look.  Twenty years on from its original release, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is as exasperating as ever.  But it’s better than any new English-language film of 2024 that I’ve so far seen[1].

    19 December 2024

    [1] Afternote:  This opinion certainly didn’t change watching Pablo Larraín’s Maria on my last cinema visit of the year.

  • Queer

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Luca Guadagnino (2024)

    Daniel Craig wasn’t entirely an exile in Bondworld during his long stint as 007.  Between Casino Royale (2006) and No Time to Die (2021), the first and last of his five appearances as James Bond, Craig’s cinema credits ranged from Defiance (2008) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) to Knives Out (2019), in which he played Detective Benoit Blanc; his first post-Bond role was Blanc again in Glass Onion (2022).  Even so, you can understand why Craig – now unquestionably a movie star, relatively less esteemed as an actor – was keen to play the lead in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer.  It’s paying off, of course.  As a gay-sex-drink-and-drugs-dependent expat American, Craig is more of a revelation than someone rated a top-notch thesp rather than a star – a Benedict Cumberbatch, say – could hope to be.  Daniel Craig is winning plaudits and prizes for his performance.  But Queer is a remarkably boring film.

    The screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes (he also wrote Challengers, another Guadagnino picture released this year) is adapted from William S Burroughs’ novella of the same name.  Although Burroughs wrote Queer immediately after Junkie, their publication dates were more than thirty years apart – Junkie in 1953, Queer in 1985:  the latter’s homosexual content was liable to be judged obscene in the US in the 1950s.  In his introduction to the published book, Burroughs confirmed that his protagonist, William Lee, was an alter ego – more specifically, that he represented Burroughs ‘off heroin’, although Lee, in Guadagnino’s version of the story at least, is certainly on other narcotics.  He’s part of a little colony of middle-aged gay Americans in Mexico City, in the early post-World War II years.  He drinks in bars with Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman), John Dumé (Drew Droege) and, briefly, Jim Cochan (the film-maker David Lowery).  They swap epigrams, reviews of their latest lovers and thoughts about who they’d like to go to bed with next – these sex partners are always younger men.  The narrative starts to take shape once Lee (as everyone calls him) claps eyes on Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), recently a GI but now another expat in Mexico.

    Take shape is actually a bit of a euphemism.  Even after Lee becomes obsessed with Eugene, Guadagnino continues to alternate scenes in shadowy bars with scenes in dusky bedrooms, a repetition that doesn’t yield intensity.  Eugene is, from Lee’s point of view, maddeningly elusive:  he’s usually seen in bars with a young woman (Ronia Ava); he won’t admit, verbally, to being queer.  He’s not physically elusive, though:  he and Lee are soon having sex together.  And while Lee and his contemporaries may have emigrated to live lives they don’t dare lead in the US, there’s next to no suggestion that gay promiscuity is dangerous in the Mexican capital.  The middle-aged expats’ existence there comprises much more talk than drama.  After a while, Lee asks Eugene to accompany him on a trip to South America.  Eugene demurs at first but then agrees to come along.  I was glad he did, if only for a change of scenery.

    Lee travels south on a mission to obtain and partake of yagé (aka ayahuasca), a plant that supposedly endows telepathic powers.  Why he wants and how he means to use ESP is less clear.  This may be an instance of Guadagnino and Justin Kuritzkes knowing their source material and its author so well that they forget their audience may not.  I haven’t read Queer but am aware that William Burroughs had a long-standing interest in ‘magic’ and travelled to the Amazon rainforest in search of ayahuasca – a journey recorded in The Yagé Letters (1963), a collection of correspondence between him and Allen Ginsberg.  Cinema has traditionally struggled to realise the writing life on screen.  It’s no loss that Guadagnino thinks better than to include shots of Lee typing and smoking furiously then, also furiously, ripping sheets from the typewriter and hurling scrunched-up balls of paper across the floor.  Typed manuscripts, replete with crossings out, do feature, though, in the montage that opens Queer and a reprise of this late on.  In between, there’s hardly any indication that Lee is a writer (even a blocked one) – or anything much else, other than a boozy, sex-hungry flâneur.

    The move from Mexico City to Ecuador does have a few immediate benefits.  Guadagnino’s affinity with light and bright colours was evident as far back as I Am Love (2009).  He enjoyed his greatest success (so far) with the lustrous Call Me by Your Name (2017).  He’s constrained in the Mexican scenes.  Most of them take place indoors and in subdued lighting.  Even the exterior sequences in Mexico City don’t seem to be happening outside – and probably weren’t:  the film was shot mostly at Cinecittà Studios.  Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s ingenious lighting sometimes suggests Hopper scenes or even a de Chirico palette but Guadagnino doesn’t seem at home in small, shaded places.  He’s more himself again when he can show Lee and Eugene swimming together in the sea off the coast of Ecuador.  Before that, the older man can’t get hold of his usual fix locally:  his withdrawal symptoms give Daniel Craig the opportunity for some bravura shaking and stumbling before Lee manages to see a doctor (Michaël Borremans), who helpfully prescribes a supply of what he needs.

    Craig has devised a convincing walk for Lee.  His hats and white linen suit make him quite a conspicuous figure; his slightly mincing gait is cagier.  Here’s a man whose movement suggests years of practice in self-concealment.  Craig also delivers his many lines with aplomb, though when he speaks you’re conscious of the vocal layers he’s affecting – the American accent, the waspish edge.  All in all, it’s a strong performance that vindicates Luca Guadagnino’s choice of lead.  It’s good news too – not just for straight actors but for filmgoers who appreciate what acting really is – that Guadagnino, a high-profile gay film-maker, has publicly dismissed the idea that Lee should have been played by a gay actor.  David Sexton’s New Statesman review implies that Guadagnino has also said that ‘he didn’t want to make a story about unrequited love.  Yet that is precisely the bitter subject of Queer the novel …’   Whatever Guadagnino may have intended, his film does reflect that theme – in what should be an interesting way:  as noted above, he shows that, for Lee, continuing physical intimacy with Eugene isn’t return enough for his feelings for the younger man.  The result isn’t interesting, alas, because not enough happens in the story and the characters don’t develop.  (Queer comprehensively denies the Aristotelian idea of plot as character revealed by action.)  Drew Starkey delivers what Guadagnino presumably wants from him – a portrait of reticence,  stubbornly undramatic.

    The film disappoints in other ways.  As screen dreams go, most of Lee’s aren’t up to much.  Most of the music is emphatically post-1950s (New Order, Nirvana, Prince and Radiohead, among others).  The main score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross does include a melancholy, relatively timeless oboe theme but, as you’d expect, this isn’t typical of the Reznor-Ross contribution as a whole.  I wondered for a while if Guadagnino meant the anachronistic music as a counterpoint to what’s on screen – as a means of stressing how different queer life was before the times in which this music was actually first heard.  But that doesn’t add up:  as far as I know, the music doesn’t have gay connections; besides, the film doesn’t do much to illustrate the social difficulties of Lee et al.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure, as I watched, of exactly when Queer was happening.  It was only when ‘(Ghost) Riders in the Sky’ came up on the soundtrack, to accompany shots of Lee and Eugene on the road to Ecuador, that I decided the story was roughly contemporary with Stan Jones’s great song.  (Jones released the original version in 1948; Guadagnino uses the Vaughn Monroe cover that reached number one in the Billboard charts the following year.)  Just as in Terence Davies’ Benediction (2021), ‘Riders’ briefly gives proceedings a shot in the arm.

    Daniel Craig isn’t the only surprising casting.  The quest for yagé takes Lee to a plants expert (Andrés Duprat) who tells him about Dr Cotter, a scientist doing research in the jungle beyond Quito.  On arrival there, Lee and Eugene are startled by the viper that, Dr Cotter explains, she keeps for purposes of security, although she has also a (silent) husband (Lisandro Alonso, another film-maker).  Her scary presence, in combination with a strikingly receded hairline and weird brown complexion, makes you wonder if a local tribe started trying to shrink Dr Cotter’s head but then chickened out.  She’s played by … Lesley Manville.  Of course:  who else would you get for a gun-toting, tough-talking, pipe-smoking American botanist?  Manville is so reliably good that I look forward to watching her whatever she’s in.  She’s one of those actors who lift the actors they’re sharing the screen with.  Although Monica Dolan delivered a terrific individual turn in the BBC’s Sherwood this summer, Manville and David Morrissey supplied much the best moments involving two people.  In her unshowy way, she carries the enjoyable Moonflower Murders, also recently on BBC.  It is a pleasure to see Lesley Manville for the ten minutes she’s on screen in Queer but a minor pleasure – that of watching a first-rate actor bring skill and integrity to a part in which they’re ludicrously miscast.

    After imbibing the doctor’s yagé brew, Lee and Eugene hallucinate spectacularly – they appear to throw up their hearts – and have ecstatic sex before Guadagnino jumps forward to an epilogue ‘two years later’.  Lee returns alone to Mexico City, where Joe tells him that Eugene went on another South American trip a few months previously.  (It’s not clear whether Lee and Eugene had seen each other at all post-Dr Cotter.)  Lee dreams that he finds Eugene in the room next to his.  He places a glass on the young man’s head and fires a gunshot that hits not the glass but Eugene.  Lee holds him tight before Eugene vanishes.  Lee then reappears as an old man, who lies down on a bed and seemingly dies.

    Although protracted, the epilogue does succeed in blurring fantasy and reality, to discomfiting effect.  It’s also a reminder that the material William S Burroughs put in Queer was autobiographical in more ways than one.  Eugene Allerton is based on a recently discharged US Navy serviceman with whom Burroughs ‘made friends’ (Wikipedia) in Mexico City.  Although he was pursuing men there, Burroughs at the time had a common-law wife, Joan Vollmer.  The couple were at a party one night, and were both drunk, when Burroughs produced a handgun and told Joan, ‘It’s time for our William Tell act’.  She obligingly balanced a glass on her head; Burroughs shot, missed the glass and killed her.  It wasn’t until I started writing this review that I noticed that Eugene’s female companion, who disappears quickly from the film, is named in the IMDb cast list as ‘Joan’.

    17 December 2024

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