spotless sunshine

Rating: Null/10 (25 April 2016)

This is very clearly a writer's film, with strong self-reference to more than one writing issue.
The most obvious and extensively used device is the time quirk that literally creates the whole story: the main character (and all the males in his family) have the ability to go back in time, revisit scenes of their own lives, and change them. This means that every scene in the film does not have a definitive script. Everything can be changed, all the time. So the film flows as an ever provisional reality, the way a writer works on a script, or for those matters, the way any creative artist works. The girl works as a book publisher, reading books from people, commenting, choosing, changing them. That's a wink.
The other, more clever device, is the inversion of the genre rules that come with the time travel trick. The film presents itself apparently as a romantic comedy that evolves into a light drama. The drama is born from the natural course of life - people die, life goes on, kids are born there are no tensions brought upon the relation between the romantic couple exactly to emphasize how normal life is what drives the fate of these characters. There is a moment when the possibility of adultery presents itself to the male character, but he drives it away, and this underlines again how definitive is the relationship between the couple. But he can travel in time, which means that even the facts of life are editable. So he goes back in time, and tries to change things like the poor love choices of his sister. The tension is all put on the struggle between the main character and his ever changeable fate It's an inversion of the rules, in which pawn and queen are brought to the same game level, one fighting the other. Imagine Gone in the wind if Scarlett could prevent the beginning of the war, or move away before it came to them, or something like that.
The acting is solid here, and I always love the comical timing and acting of Bill Nighy. This film won't change your life or affect it in significant ways, but some parts of it will maybe stay with you, and the honesty in the portrait of romantic couple and father/son intimacy is truly remarkable from Gleeson/McAdams and Gleeson/Nighy.
I trust Curtis, I always expect and know that he will always think about the structure of the film in terms of writing, and that means that he cares about storytelling conceived specifically for the screen, and I cherish that.