Pretentious, overrated bore

Rating: 4/10 (9 March 2005)

Pretentious, overrated bore. Charlie Kaufman's screenplay seems to be trying to get at the way memory colors and shapes (sometimes inaccurately) our waking experiences and perceptions. But rather than developing that idea into anything of substance, Kaufman is content simply to hang an anchor around his neck and throw himself down a painfully repetitive, seemingly bottomless spiral of scenes in which Kate Winslet disappears from Jim Carrey's consciousness. The first time this happens, there's a fun, scary, "Twilight Zone"-y effect, but then it happens again, and then it happens again, and then guess what happens next, and then just when you think something new is finally going to happen, Kaufman follows it up with a big et cetera, et cetera.
It doesn't help much that he hasn't made his two principal characters particularly likable or believable as a couple  the relationship we're shown is all high and lows, without any of the "middles" that comprise 90% of human relationships in the real world (as opposed to the sort of graduate-student meta-universe Kaufman prefers to explore in his films). Like Adam Sandler in "Punch-Drunk Love," Jim Carrey for the most part tones it down, and like Emily Watson in that same film, Kate Winslet is a very good actress, but neither one is ever able to turn these characters into real people we feel we know well. (This is particularly laughable with Carrey, since most of the movie takes place inside Joel's head!) As for the other characters, they're uniformly unpleasant, even repulsive (the subplot surrounding Tom Wilkinson and Kirsten Dunst is particularly ugly), and they might have fit in perfectly with an aggressively satirical approach that this film entirely lacks.
As for Michel Gondry's direction, it's sort of generically creative with over-heavy indie seasoning; it occasionally reminded me of smaller, better movies like "Dream with the Fishes," and there were times when I wondered whether I would have been easier on it if it was some little unknown thing coming out of left field, instead of a Major Indie Happening with so many big names attached to it. It really does sink under the weight of the collective star power, but I can't help thinking that the repetitiousness would have made it boring no matter what. It's not quite as empty and useless as Christopher Nolan's "Memento," perhaps, but it tries hard. 4 out of 10.