HARRISON SALISBURY TAKES IT BACK:

DON’T LOOK BACK: a review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (ANTHONY LANE, 2004-03-15, The New Yorker)

Do you feel clever, punk? Well, do you? Because that’s the only way to get your head around the latest Charlie Kaufman flick. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is written by Kaufman, directed by Michel Gondry, and set in the kind of weather that makes you pray for five minutes of sunshine, never mind the eternal variety. On a biting Valentine’s Day, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) calls in sick and sneaks off to the beach—a glum arena for the battle of sand and snow, and as vacant as the moon until the arrival of a snuffling figure in flame red. This is Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), and she and Joel are strangers. Or, to be accurate, they have met before, on this same bleak strand, and spent the night together, and tumbled into love, and split in some distress. But today, unbeknownst to each other, they are starting from scratch.

The premise of “Eternal Sunshine” is that scratch is a pretty radical place to be. Kaufman, as he showed with “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” is not so much a conjurer with a trick up his sleeve as a guy madly sewing extra sleeves onto his jacket, and this mischievous new movie cannot restrain itself from pouring forth conceits. The two big ideas are as follows. First, the story runs backward, yanking us from the lovers on the frozen shore, through the fall and rise of their affair, and so on, until their original meeting. Second, both Clementine and Joel call on Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who runs a sleazy little operation called Lacuna. There, with help from his assistants, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood), Dr. Mierzwiak will take your money and blow your mind. Specifically, he will put you to sleep, set up a brain scan, and blow away portions of your mind, like cobwebs or particles of dirt, leaving you with a nice clean space where a memory used to be. Thus, one mournful lady sits in the waiting room with a dog’s bowl and bone, unable to bear the loss of her late Buster. She will presumably hand over his effects and then, after a blast from the Lacuna zapper, forget that the poor pooch ever existed. And so it is with Joel and Clementine: each deletes all traces of the other.

This is, of course, unrefined sci-fi, but one of the virtues of “Eternal Sunshine” is that, thanks to some careful roughening from Michel Gondry, it maintains the beautiful illusion of looking like [scatological reference deleted].

Okay, The New Yorker can be, or has been in the past, almost unbearably staid, but is it really improved by such totally gratuitous foul-mouthedness? David Remnick should be ashamed of himself.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 16, 2004 3:15 PM