Brain wash

Noel Vera

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is yet another product of
eccentric, enigmatic scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman's brain, a light-
footed riff on love, loss, memory, forgetting.

It's the story of Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), who one day mysteriously
takes off from his work commute to hook up with an eccentric, blue-
haired girl named Clementine (Kate Winslet). They seem oddly
appropriate for each other, in the way they're wildly mismatched
(Barish is moody and unsociable, Clem weird and aggressively flirty);
everything about the meeting feels off-key for some reason, and this
feeling of discord leads to the revelation that (typical in a Kaufman
script) everything isn't what it appears to be--or everything doesn't
stay the way it's supposed to be.

Turns out that Clem and Barish were previously involved in an affair
gone bad, and that Clem had gone to a company named Lacuna Inc. to
have all memories of the affair (and of Barish) erased. Barish,
feeling the need for peace, or resolution, or some kind of revenge
(most likely a hurt and angry mixture of all three) goes to Lacuna to
have Clem erased as well. All you have to do is go to their offices
(which look much like an HMO), sign up for the procedure, collect and
turn in all artifacts and souvenirs of the memories to be erased (but
what about joint checking accounts, or shared properties, or--god
forbid--children?), then go home and sleep while Lacuna employees
wipe your memories clean.

There's a subplot involving Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) who owns
the company, his secretary Mary (Kirsten Dunst), her technician
boyfriend Frank (Mark Ruffalo) and his colleague Patrick (Elijah
Wood) each of whom in his or her own sneaky way abuse their position
of power over their clients. It's meant to be a satire on the
professionalism of--scientists? Doctors? Therapists? Some kind of
specialized service professionals? Kaufman isn't too clear as to what
these people are supposed to be, exactly, though their hi-jinks make
you think of the foolishness that must go on while you're under
anesthesia.

All wonderfully ingenious and evocative and all, as can be expected
from Kaufman, whose previous screenplays--among others, "Being John
Malkovich," about a hapless puppeteer (John Cuzack) who discovers a
portal into actor John Malkovich's mind for fifteen minutes and
proceeds to sell tickets at the door; "Adaptation," about an
unfilmable novel on orchids, and the attempts of one Charlie Kaufman
(played by Nicholas Cage) to adapt the novel onto the big screen--
showed that his is perhaps one of the most fertile and fermenting
minds working right now in mainstream Hollywood. French music-video
director Michel Gondry helps Kaufman's script much in the same way
music-video director Spike Jonze helped "Malkovich" and "Adaptation,"
by making the transitions from reality to unreality (in this case,
reality to memory) as smoothly palpable as possible: no obvious CGI
effects, a heavy reliance on on-camera and theatrical effects and on
understated surrealism.

But more than the imaginative storyline, the opportunities for a
director to knock himself out with strange imagery, and the chance
for a talented cast to sink its teeth into memorably skewed
characters, there's the belated evidence that Kaufman--finally--has
developed a living, breathing, aching heart. It's not that he's
unfeeling--all his films have this intense sense of melancholic
loneliness--it's that his protagonists, from Cuzack's genius
puppeteer to Cage's sweatily uncomfortable portrait of Kaufman seem
to have to struggle to actually develop a relationship, to make a
connection with someone, the drama being all about trying to achieve
this basic level in human relations. In "Eternal Sunshine" Barish
already has a relationship with Clem, and it's this relationship--
this (Kaufman's apparent reluctance to actually say the word out loud
is infectious) love--and Barish's belated efforts to preserve his
memories of it despite Lacuna's implacable thoroughness that forms
the film's uncharacteristically poignant emotional core.

To put it precisely, "Eternal Sunshine" unlike most of Kaufman's
works is moving, in the way it shows us a love being lost--gradually,
painfully, with much struggle. The process comes to evoke many
things: the terrible progression of Alzheimer's; the process of
forgetting that takes place in a life that goes on living beyond a
partner's death (or worse, a relationship's); the complete and
inexorably annihilative quality of time itself.

It's easily Kaufman's best work to date, and perhaps of much of the
cast's--Jim Carrey actually seems to transcend his usually Plastic
Man attempts at humor; Kate Winslet is (as usual) a force of nature;
Kirsten Dunst transforms an annoyingly persistent presence into
something actually poignant; Tom Wilkinson underplays admirably; and
Elijah Wood helps wipe out much of the memory of his endlessly weepy
hero in those endless hobbit movies.

It's also, of course, a reworking (but then again, what recent
science-fiction film isn't?) of some of the ideas of the late, great
Philip K. Dick: both the concept of memories being manipulated by a
commercial concern (the short story "We Can Remember it For You
Wholesale," the basis for the Arnold Schwarzenegger / Paul Verhoeven
action flick "Total Recall"), and the concept of a character
struggling against an induced memory loss (the short
story "Paycheck," basis of the Ben Affleck / John Woo action flick of
the same title). It's instructive to note, though, that where Kaufman
uses memory manipulation to prick our sense of nostalgia and loss,
Dick uses it to increase our sense of paranoia and fear (also
interesting to note that, reading Dick, the human relationships seem
much more complex, more adult somehow, than what you find in Kaufman--
but that's a whole different article right there). Suffice to say,
Kaufman takes some of Dick's basic ideas (and Dick's inconstant,
slippery sense of reality) and uses it, fairly successfully, to his
own distinctive ends.

(First published in Businessworld, 8/6/04)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)