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.
