Exhilarating invention

Rating: Null/10 (30 June 2004)

Consciously or not, Hollywood often concurrently releases a number of films that treat similar subjects. Last year, the common thread was the defence of the family home. This year, it is memory and its erosion, in a line that runs through 50 First Dates, Paycheck, and now Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. With its science-fiction trappings  a man (Jim Carrey) decides to have all memory of his ex-girlfriend (Kate Winslet) erased from his brain  Sunshine threatens to be one of those gimmicky, what-if movies (Witness Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451: what if all books were banned and we had to memorise them in order to keep literature alive? The film itself is flat: the premise is everything.) Thankfully, the film is more interested in how our sense of identity relies on what we remember.
Carrey has  who would have thought it  a gentle presence here, as befits a man whose brain has just been re-formatted. His face is no longer rubbery, flip: ruffled, unshaven, it has never seemed so lived-in, with a crease in one cheek. He has a touching hesitancy. The film begins with one of writer Charlie Kaufman's trademark mumbles, an obsessive monologue full of insecurities and minor detail. Carrey plays hooky from work, goes on an impromptu holiday. There he meets Clementine (Winslet). Their first meeting is awkward: like most of Kaufman's men, Joel Barish is a bit of a stiff. Clementine tries to stand out by surrounding herself with oddball details  she has dolls made out of potatoes, and her hair changes colour every five minutes. Winslet has an aggression here that keeps her from being merely whimsical. We see why she is with Carrey: Clementine feels more wild and free by contrast. He needs her prodding.
SPOILER ALERT
The film really begins once the couple split. Anyone who, post break-up, has ever done something rash will understand the impulse to delete an offending ex. While Carrey is in bed, two technicians (Mark Ruffalo, with tousled hair and a sleepy drawl, and Elijah Wood) call on his house and erase those parts of his brain that store memories of Clementine. "It's a controlled form of brain damage," says presiding doctor Tom Wilkinson, "but no worse than a night of heavy drinking." Much of Sunshine is set in Joel's brain: we relive his memories as they begin to vanish. The details are sucked out of existence, and they begin to have the confusing blankness of a nightmare. Michel Gondry is a whiz at weird, dreamlike distortions of space and time. The slats of a picket fence disappear one by one. Faces become blank, lose their identifying marks. In one scene, Joel careers to and fro down a single street, always ending back at his car. All this happens very fast: there is an exhilarating sense of invention.