Stylish and not wacky

Rating: 8/10 (11 May 2004)

I've been looking forward to the release of this film for some time. Although the cinema trailers prepared me for the basic concepts, I have to say the structure of the movie took me slightly by surprise. The idea of your lead characters spending most of the movie in one of their heads is intriguing, and it's hard to think of anyone other than Charlie Kaufman who could have pulled it off.
So let's start from the beginning. We witness what appears to be Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine's (Kate Winslet) first meeting, which all goes very well. Then, as we're settling into the movie, the opening titles finally play and we're into their break-up. The concept of Lacuna Inc is introduced  it transpires that their science-fiction tinged services have allowed Clementine to completely erase Joel from her memories. Pained by this, Joel agrees to undergo the procedure too. This occurs at his flat that night. As he sleeps, Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood plug him into their machine and begin to delete. The only trouble is, trapped in his own unconscious, Joel has changed his mind, and is desperately trying to keep hold of Clementine in whatever way he can.
Although the attention-grabbing bit of this movie takes place in Jim Carrey's head, there are nice moments beyond it too. The Lacuna team are well-represented, and the sheer moral discomfort we get from seeing Dunst and Ruffalo frolic in their undies around Carrey's corpse-like form heightens Kaufman's dark vision. Dunst, in particular, is very good, and it's always nice to see Tom Wilkinson in a film. More curious is Elijah Wood, completing the foursome. It's good to report that, after all this time, it didn't seem odd to see Frodo as a human, but one has to wonder why he took the part as he has very little to do. Nonetheless, the moments he does have are very nice, and more or less set him up as the unexpected villain of the piece.
So to the stars. Everyone's been enthusing about Kate Winslet's performance. She is good, and I don't think I've seen this character from her before, but then I always knew she was a good actress. Jim Carrey, however, makes the film his own. You know how every role he does is more or less a riff on the Carrey/Ventura persona? How, even in Truman Show, his `good afternoon, good evening and good night' schtick is still there? Well, it's not here. There is nothing of Carrey the wacky comedian in here. This is surely the performance of his career, and probably my favourite performance of the year so far.
I really liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I can't help but feel that the central concept isn't fully explored  does no-one think that people might want to erase memories not connected with bad love affairs? This doesn't matter, so long as you take it as another in the chain of high-concept magic realism love stories that have been sprinkling smiled into our multiplexes over the past few years. Michael Gondry's direction, though showy, is slightly less flashy than Spike Jonze's in Being John Malkovich, and all the better for it. On this evidence, Kaufman is likely to remain the most important writer in America for the foreseeable future.
8/10