Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Love is a dangerous game. It's a nerve-wracking, devastating affair full of desperation, anger, regret, and a pain so indescribable that all the music in the world has never captured it all. At least, that's what love represents when you lose it. Breakups and unrequited love generally result in a sort of emotional fallout, the kind that leads a man to spill his secrets to the barkeep before drunkenly singing "their song" to a room full of increasingly uncomfortable patrons. The reminiscing doesn't come until later.

Joel Barish hasn't reached that stage yet. At the start of the film he's dealing with a nasty break-up with Clementine (Kate Winslet), a free spirit who conflicted greatly with his own withdrawn persona. Jim Carrey takes all that manic energy he usually forces upon the audience and buries it under layers of nervousness and an empathic sense of shame. Already reeling from the end of their relationship, Joel gets another sock in the gut when he learns that Clementine went to the experimental medical firm Lacuna, Inc., which specializes in memory deletion and reconstruction, to erase the relationship from her mind.

Dejected and enraged, Joel rushes in and demands that Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) perform the same procedure on him. That'll show her. Even though Lacuna is inundated for the Valentine's Day season, the doctor pencils him in and tells our hapless protagonist to go home and collect anything with a sentimental attachment to Clementine. He returns to the office, sits in a special chair, and Mierzwiak's assistants, Patrick and Stan (Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo), get to work.

And that's where any possibility of describing the plot in words ends. Director Michel Gondry has always been someone fascinated with the wavy line between dreams and reality, but that was before he partnered with modern legend Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman too deals with the bizarre and fascinating line between dreams and awareness, and the two prove to be a formidable team. The result is a film that continuously pulls the rug out from under you just as you managed to get back up after the last time.

As the process erases Joel's memories, we see his dream personification wander through each memory, constantly upended as the world literally crumbles around him. As the process whisks him into each subsequent scenario Joel finds himself forced to confront the memories he paid to have erased, and he slowly reaches an epiphany: eradicating Clem from his mind will erase the only happiness he ever knew. Eventually he manages to convince the Clementine from his memory of what's going on and the two essentially try to outrun the universe that caves in around them.

Then things just get weird. Joel, in an attempt to "protect" Clem (this is dream Clem, mind you), he runs into older memories, regressing into his childhood while Clementine stares on in bemusement. Editing isn't normally the filmmaking aspect one focuses on with a romantic comedy-drama, but Valdis Oskarsdottir had his work cut out for him when he made a film written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry. Images jump, buzz, fade and warp like a hyperspeed music video, yet the style never gets in the way of the deep human understanding Kaufman and Gondry convey.

That understanding ultimately is what propels the film from being just an interesting experiment into one of the all-time best romantic films ever made, and certainly one of the ten best of the decade. Joel's not the only one with issues; the real Clementine must deal with the confusion left by suddenly removed memories, while a mysterious subplot involves Lacuna, Inc.'s secretary (Kirsten Dunst). Patrick's got something up his sleeve as well. Each of these stories adds levels of intrigue and depth to a story already overflowing with both, and it ensures that repeat viewings are rewarding.

Eternal Sunshine is one of those films I have trouble writing about, not only because I want everyone to experience it for themselves but because I worry that I'd only get lost in my platitudes. So perfect is every element -- the editing, the direction, the off-the-wall yet piercing script, the acting -- and so expertly and originally are they arranged that it stands on its own island. I can't imagine anyone having the balls to try to duplicate it, because it's so singular any attempt to build on it will immediately be seen as a ripoff. It boasts career-best performances from Carrey and Winslet, and at the very least all the other actors put in excellent work. Kaufman's script might lack the ambition of his later opus Synecdoche, New York and the wit of Adaptation, but he injects such a knowing sadness and hope into the film that he finally proves true the saying so many dismiss as pithy: 'twas better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.

Synecdoche, New York

There’s a heck of a lot going on in Charlie Kaufman’s latest opus, “Synecdoche, New York,” so much so that even the critics, whom everyone loves to paint as out-of-touch elitists who automatically reward any film too intricate for them to “get,” are sharply divided on the issue. I saw it once and loved it, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t need to see it again.

The plot, insomuch as I could possibly summarize, concerns Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a playwright who receives a MacArthur genius grant after producing a successful version of “Death of a Salesman.” When his wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a critically acclaimed painter, takes their daughter and leaves for Germany, Caden decides to use his grant money to make a grand statement: a play about life itself.

What results is the most epic theater production you’ve ever seen. Cotard leases out a warehouse and slowly creates a miniature version of New York City. His cast grows into the hundreds, possibly thousands, all in effect playing themselves. Cotard wanders city streets and you can never be certain if they are the actual streets or his set until he starts giving notes to people. In one of the more amusing running gags of the film, the actors never can pull off acting naturally; they inject a melodrama into their performances no matter how many times Caden tells them to be ‘normal.’

In classic Kaufman tradition, the lines between reality and the play, between consciousness and dreams, slowly fades until it’s anyone’s guess what, if anything, is actually happening. As Caden buries himself deeper in the project, he slowly drives himself mad with the undertaking of it all; soon, he’s hiring actors to play…the other actors, and actors for those actors as well. Sammy (Tom Noonan), who plays Caden’s doppelganger, has followed and studied the playwright for decades, but when he finally collects his notes and dives into the character he is driven to madness. Caden himself can barely hold himself together; what hopes does an actor have? Eventually the lines blur so much that Caden starts to play himself (or play himself playing himself, it’s hard to keep track) under the guidance of a new director. My good friend Wikipedia tells me that Caden’s surname, Cotard, is the name of a psychological condition in which a person believes himself to be dead or dying, which certainly fits with Caden’s fascination with the subject, and of his own mysterious, debilitating illness.

As complex as the film gets, Kaufman sums it up with the title: Synecdoche, a term that denotes a part of something to refer to the whole, or vice-versa. This is Kaufman’s attempt to prove that old Shakespearean line “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Every play and every movie is a reflection of life, and this is the (il)logical extreme of art. It seems so simple when it’s written down like that, doesn’t it? Well, despite its clear, resonant, darkly funny message, the steps that the film takes towards it are where I get confused. I do not need another viewing to “get” it, but to discover that which was not apparent when I first watched it.

“Synecdoche may not be Charlie Kaufman’s best film, but it is perhaps his greatest. I detest movies like “Donnie Darko,” which receive praise for being deliberately obtuse seemingly because people mistake wheel-spinning, navel-gazing nonsense for depth, but “Synecdoche” really does work. Just as the title suggests, every part of this film serves as a microcosm for the world; it is so dense and layered that it is inevitably sluggish, but I kept on staring in wonder.