Tangerine Dream

Rating: 9/10 (22 November 2008)

A serio-comedy about love, "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind" winds up being a lot like love itself. It's hard to explain just why it sticks with you the way it does, beyond some obvious surface charms. Unless you are one of those people who don't get it, in which case, you just need to give it another chance.
A typically offbeat Charlie Kaufman script presents us with three days in the life of Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), a scruffy, despondent man so intimidated by life and love that he has walled himself up emotionally. On a seemingly unmotivated ride on the Long Island Railroad, he meets a woman named Clementine (Kate Winslet) whose blue-tinted hair and orange sweatshirt make her resemble the love child of Pippi Longstocking and Mr. Met. Is Clementine the one for Joel? And why can't he remember the song "My Darling Clementine" or Huckleberry Hound?
The answers to these and other mysteries are the content of "Eternal Sunshine", which takes a headfirst dive into how memory and love constitute one's identity. Director Michel Gondry has a field day pulling the rug out from under the audience every five minutes, but he's working to advance the plot, not complicate it. Starting the opening credits 20 minutes in may seem pretentious, but watching it a second time, you realize how perfect a fit that is, just as you do the many other seemingly random threads woven through the fabric of the film.
The richness of "Eternal Sunshine" can really only be appreciated on multiple viewings, but give Kaufman, Gondry, and the rest of the crew and cast credit for constructing a film that hits one the first time with enough depth, humor, and mystery to make a repeat viewing intriguing enough even to those who aren't immediately swept away. It not only becomes a clearer film the second time you watch it, but a funnier one, too, where seemingly bland lines like "Okay", "Can I help you?" and "You think I'm nice?" click like Legos that together make up a splendidly elaborate castle.
"Don't make any jokes about my name!" Clementine warns Joel at the outset of the film. This is one film where Carrey is a safe bet not to do that, playing Joel as intensely low-key, alternately fascinated and repelled by Clementine's high-energy antics. It's a great performance that goes against everything you expect from Carrey, and adds to the film's wistful mood of love's bitter afterglow.
There are parts of the film I still don't get, and parts I still don't like. Maybe I need to see it more than four times, but there are moments that feel extraneous. One, involving a trick Joel plays on Clementine with some ketchup, is described by Gondry in a DVD commentary as something he pulled from his own life, which shows his emotional investment in the product. David Cross can be funny, but he just seems wasted here for some weak pot jokes.
Overall, this is a film that reminds me of why movies are such a touchstone of life for me. It plays the same kind of tricks as "Momento", but with a Preston Sturges heart that belies such shallow trickery. If you want to see a movie that sticks with one like this does, I suggest Sturges' "The Lady Eve". Love may be a pointless game with guaranteed heartbreak of one sort or another, but the richly humanistic "Eternal Sunshine" dares to make a compelling case that the game's only real losers are those who never play.