clever but shallow and pretentious film-school exercise

Rating: 3/10 (25 May 2004)

Ten minutes into ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, it was clear that screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has a limited bag of tricks. What was clever in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH the first time I saw it became pretentious during the second viewing and insufferable during the third viewing. ADAPTATION was a similarly too-clever pretentious exercise in modernist style with no substance. ETERNAL SUNSHINE mines the same vein, but this time around the results are about as substantial as cotton candy and as permanent as a fireworks display. Except for the cutesy plot device--which was refreshing decades ago when handled by the likes of a Godard or a Philip K. Dick or a Harold Pinter--the film is like a second-string Woody Allen project fed into a blender (or rewritten by Donald Barthelme). The "insights" about relationships in this film are, as one critic aptly described it, about as profound as those in a Hugh Grant movie. And as "experimental" as Kaufman may think he is being, the plot is as predictable as that of any b-movie, once one figures out the premise of the story (which the slowest audience member will do in about 20 minutes). And what's the point of the murky faux-cinema-verite visual style in many scenes? The three points out of ten I awarded this film are primarily for the actors, Jim Carrey in particular. When will the Hollywood establishment and the critics finally learn that Kaufman is a one-trick-pony? The emperor is not wearing any clothes here. As someone who has championed and supported TRUE avant-garde filmmaking for decades, I see this as a cheap Hollywood pastiche of the avant garde. Those who found John Sayles' LONE STAR to be "multi-layered" instead of cliche-ridden will find much to praise and discuss in ETERNAL SUNSHINE. While Kaufman is not as bad as P.T. Anderson (at least Mr. Kaufman manages to honor traditional story structures while re-fashioning them, and at least he can create REAL if shallow characters, something Anderson hasn't learned to do), my evening would have been better spent watching a straight-to-video action film or some obsscure 1950s Allied Artists post-noir crime film. Rent this one...or better yet, rent something else!