Mnemonic Scenes Hang on Crumbling Walls

Rating: 9/10 (3 August 2005)

When we reach crisis moments with someone we love, we are faced with a couple of ways to deal with it, depending on the circumstances.
One way, vis a vis pessimism, is in assuming something is so broken that it isn't fixable. And so we take measures to fully complete that break. Even when this is necessary, it is still painful because there's always a little bit of self-destruction that is unavoidable. Erasing memories involve erasing little parts of ourselves as well.
Another way, more in hope, is to consciously reach back and search out all the good memories, so as to recreate the once shared life based upon those genuine moments and experiences. This is intended to fuel our desire to save the sinking ship. A declaration of interdependence is drafted in one's mind, something giving evidence that the positives of the relationship well outweigh the negatives, and those negatives are seen as just part of the package.
So Kaufman, et al, drew up a scenario in which both of these approaches occur within the same relationship. To bring us deep into the broken psyche of someone in this situation, we begin at the aftermath of the end (after some preliminaries), and we work backwards. Isn't that what people do when they mull over a painful split with someone they love? Working backwards every step, through the good and the bad, to survey all the pictures that were painted, the visions co-created, the inspirations drawn from each other and for each other.
It's a sort of mnemonic museum at that point, but as time begins to flatten those landscapes, the walls begin to crumble, the pictures will become fractured and dirty and harder to discern. Faces are blurred. Items are missing. Memories are trodden by frantic changes in circumstances.
The peculiar cinematic genius here, of course, and what makes this film a must-see, is in exactly how Kaufman and Gondry present this phenomenon. The massive, compelling centerpiece of this film is the single, vivid night of our protagonist Joel who, in the most literal sense possible, chases down his fading dreams of Clementine.
Thankfully, we have a director who is masterful at cinematic flow of the quirky, so that the convoluted arrangement of memories, visions and various interspliced scenes are strung together in a complex tapestry that does not quite overwhelm our senses. We can accept this theatrical style put to new use in a truthful dream logic. For instance, Joel walks us directly from the trauma at Barnes and Nobles to reflective conversation in a neighbor's apartment, in a seamless flow (the only seam possibly being a door frame, but it's more of an incidental passage marker); lending immediacy to his confusion over that fresh experience, visually recalled within a somber dialogue. And that was just to prepare us for the spectacular night journey to come, having been foreshadowed by the series of lights turning off in the bookstore. An atypical journey, instead of events unfolding, they are folding back in on themselves. A multitude of vignettes in reverse is a very unique form of storytelling.
One more point. It must be a great time to be an actor who gets to be involved in these kinds of projects. The kinds of projects I'm talking about are where a main character, as narrator and guide, take us down a certain path in the story. But then (typically within the climax of the third act) it is revealed that this path was unreliable from the start, fantasy, or deception. And so we as the audience have to reach back and reinterpret all the mannerisms and motives of at least some of the characters we think we have come to know. (Think of the Usual Suspects, where in the final series of explanations we are offered several possible alternatives, and so we have to construct several possible characters out of a single actor).
So the actors in Eternal Sunshine get to act within at least two possible dimensions at the same time, always striding the possibilities that will be presented later, in a way to convince us of things we are not really supposed to be convinced of. Of course its fun to be tricked by sudden twists in the story, but the real treat is in the acting that is open to interpretation. I have no problem with this being a recent cliché in "edgy" films, because it encourages deeper levels of interaction from the audience. It is one more way for a film to effectively reach out and mingle with our spotted minds.