More Kaufman brilliance

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2004)

What really strikes you is how cold it always looks. Most of the time in romantic comedies, the sun is always warmly shining and the colours are bright and vibrant. Here Michael Gondry has used a very drab and muted colour palate for almost every scene, and occasionally added a snow drift too small and wind-swept to be festive, but perfect for depressing the cold and lonely. Compare the beach so often featured in this movie to the one in Something's Gotta Give for a perfect example.
Gondry's images create a visual experience in which Charlie Kaufman's latest screenplay can work to best effect. In a lighter, more cinematic, world, Jim Carrey's protagonist would have seemed impossibly inhibited, and there would seem no reason why he and Clementine couldn't live happily ever after from the moment they met. But this movie looks too much like a real cold and cloudy morning in February for us to harbour any such delusions. Life is never like in the movies, but only the best movies acknowledge the fact.
Practically everything about this movie's depiction of dreams is as perfect as it logically can be, right down to the books you can see but can't read. It recognizes that when your subconscious chooses to mix and match, it has no respect whatsoever for what you would consciously consider to be normal. And it also does not delude us that if lots of our memories were erased, we would actually miss them. How much do you actually remember? If you cast your mind back and encountered a blank, would you suspect something, or just figure nothing worth remembering had happened?
The movie also strikes a nice balance between pure philosophizing and more accessible comedy content. While the mental intricacies go on inside Jim Carrey's sleeping head, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Elijah Wood display a contempt for his sleeping form and his apartment unworthy of a lab rat. The contrast works even better than it sounds.
Kaufman's screenplay here is actually his own original work, which makes it all the more remarkable. In recent years, mainstream Hollywood seems to have taken up a fascination with the ins and outs of the human mind and memory, but depressingly often this simply amounts to nothing more than loose adaptations of Philip K. Dick short stories. I for one welcome something a little more complex.