Being Charlie Kaufman
A writer's greatest strength is often also a writer's greatest weakness. The greatest strength of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) is his sheer quirky intelligence. No one else working in Hollywood takes on bigger ideas, or makes time-honored questions about the nature of identity and creativity seem so unexpectedly new. Conversely, Kaufman's screenplays are prone to suffer from his quirky intelligence. He's so quick that he wants to exhaust all the possible answers before his viewers can really enjoy the texture of his curiously wrought perplexities. If he were a novelist, one suspects, not only would he write the Cliff Notes to his own books; he would Xerox them directly onto his story. In his previous movies, he's played the resulting illegibility for laughs. When it works, nothing's funnier. When it doesn't, the squinting leaves you with a headache for days afterward.

Oh my darlin', oh my darlin'...
Kaufman's latest, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is another confrontation with the "meta-ness" of a postmodern existence, how we're so busily detached from our lives that it's easier to analyze them than live them. Like Memento, another film about the powers and limits of memory, Eternal Sunshine mostly unspools backwards. We meet Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) bolting from his commuter train on Valentine's Day, and ending up on a desolately pretty, snow-dusted beach. There he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet) and they proceed to share a ferociously anti-meet-cute train ride. It's perversely romantic how unromantic this is: Joel's so recessive and negligible he's about to implode, and Clementine goes beyond "come hither" into "I said get your sorry @$$ hither now, dammit." Nothing's sexier than domineering, volatile neurosis. The twist is that they've done this before, although neither of them knows it. Their relationship has already ended badly once, and they've each had their memories of the whole thing wiped clean by a new medical procedure.

From here, we flash back to Joel's decision to erase Clementine, which is based on pure spite: she's erased him first. As he undergoes the procedure, we get the bitter, most recent memories first, the recriminations all the more painful because they so pungently reverse a genuine devotion now found unsustainable. The screenplay is sharpest on this sort of ugliness, and Carrey so thoroughly internalizes stereotypical male insecurities that their eruption is more effectively brutal. As he goes further back into his history with Clementine, the memories become more tender and playful, and half way through the procedure he wants it stopped.

Insert Star Trek reference here...
Anyone who's familiar with Star Trek V (if so, my condolences) could have seen this coming, but the way the shift plays out here is actually pretty inventive. His memory of Clementine develops her own personality, and they collaborate on hiding her some place in his head where the targeted devastation of the procedure won't find her. The screwiness and visual wit of this stretch harkens back to Being John Malkovich, and it's in some respects more entertaining for being so carefully circumscribed within the larger vista of the film. It helps, too, that the story becomes as much about the people operating on Joel (Tom Wilkinson's doctor; lab techs Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood; secretary Kirsten Dunst) as about Joel and Clementine. We've come to expect this sort of shift in Kaufman's work. There's always a man behind the curtain onscreen to remind us that there's a man behind the curtain offscreen who's in control and above it all somehow. Weirdly enough, this was more rather than less true in Adaptation, where they happened to be the same person. The alternative plot sets up the moral of the story: those who forget the past yeah yeah. The alternative plot sets up the moral of the story: those who forget the past yeah yeah. The performances, however, make this simple moral more complex; those who do remember are not conspicuously less doomed. Dunst and Wilkinson will haunt you long after you've given up on Joel and Clementine.

That's the weakness of this movie, really. When Clementine complains to Joel on more than one occasion that she is "not a concept," I feel compelled to politely disagree. Kaufman's still more comfortable with ideas than he is with characters. The movie takes its title from a line in Alexander Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard," but for my money there's another description of mind earlier in the poem that's at least as telling about the film's concerns. Here is Eloisa, writing a letter to the lover she can never see again: "My fancy formed thee of angelic kind, / Some emanation of th' all-beauteous Mind." At the dawn of a relationship we always dream that the one we love is who we want her (him) to be, rather than who she (he) really is. The mistake Joel keeps making with Clementine is that he can't accept her as anything other than spotless, preferring what his fancy forms rather than resign his wishes to someone who just might be able to answer his prayers (that last bit also paraphrased from Pope). We don't actually care whether or not their second chance will turn out differently than the first, but we are interested. I'm not eager to see Eternal Sunshine again, but I don't want to forget it either.