Good idea lacking necessary depth

Rating: 5/10 (4 March 2005)

Eternal Sunshine is neither the masterpiece that many people will have you believe nor is it awful as the backlashers claim. Once again Charlie Kaufman takes the kernel of a great idea and overloads it with his own obsessive personality. The idea of a couple fighting to retain beautiful memories of their past together while undergoing a memory erasure is ingenious. Kaufman definitely hits some poignant notes along the way (he's great at communicating the mundane pleasures and comforts of relationships), but Joel and Clementine's characters seem like mere sketches rather than fully developed people that the audience can care about. Joel in particular is maddening because he's the same schlubby protagonist that is in all of Kaufman's scripts: it's Charlie himself. The man is simply incapable of creating characters outside the bounds of his own personality. Also, the movie isn't as enjoyable as it should be. Though I wanted to see how it ended (even though I predicted the plot twist about 30 minutes into the movie), Kaufman denies the audience the pleasures of human connection with the characters in favor of convoluted, intricately distanced storytelling. The characters come across as rats in an experiment or pawns in a chess game or any other omniscient metaphor you can think of. And the subplot between the workers of Lunaca fits but in an unimaginative, convenient way. I must say that all of the performances were excellent (except Elijah Wood, but he didn't have much of a character anyway), particularly Winslet and Mark Ruffalo. Director Michel Gondry and his team of technicians give the movie an appropriately jittery, jagged rhythm and look. It feels like the work of a writer on anti-depressants and Valium filtered through the mind of a director on a 3-day caffeine binge. That's not necessarily a bad thing because without the energy and gimmickry that Gondry brings to the film, the emptiness of the conception would be all the more glaring. Don't believe the hype but don't discount the film altogether either. It seems that many people are discovering something profound in it. Self-doubt and emotional shallowness might be the new status quo.