Charlie Kaufman does it again with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. What 'it' might be we're not really sure, but you saw it for the first time when John Cusack wriggled through a trapdoor and landed in John Malkovich's brain. After Being John Malkovich came Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and with all three came the kind of publicity that today makes a Charlie Kaufman screenplay a brand-name seal of approval. A Kaufman is a Kaufman because anything can happen, and will happen, and when it does happen, it'll be exponentially more bizarre than your own (pitifully stunted) imagination can possibly comprehend.
Eternal Sunshine is a love story, because nothing is more creative than the mind's own morbid fascination with self-inflicted misery.
Clementine Kruczynski (played by a rainbow-haired Kate Winslet) finds a variation on true love with Joel Barish (Jim Carrey). Joel is slightly deep and slightly boring. Clementine seems tired of her own spontaneity, and for some reason they hit it off. A few missteps later some angry words are exchanged, the love train derails and we wonder: Was it wrong from the beginning? Once it's over, does that even matter?
Love is being told, when it happens, that it's better to have loved and to have lost than never to have loved at all. Bullshit. If love makes the world go 'round, loss makes it grind to a screeching, screaming halt, leaving one lonely soul to orbit a ruined life and wonder what went wrong. Love hurts. Love can be a bitch.
For those who would rather forget, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) offers salvation in the form of a new medical procedure that literally erases every last trace of a painful relationship. "Technically," he explains, "the procedure is brain damage, about on par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'd miss." This isn't science fiction, and the specifics don't really matter. His procedure targets individual memories of a person and methodically exterminates them, one by one.
So Clementine erases Joel, and Joel decides to reciprocate. But this is Charlie Kaufman. You know it's not that simple, he knows you know it's not that simple and the actual story is too complicated to explain. The procedure, and the movie, unfold like a lucid dream. Within this dream, reliving his memories of Clementine one by one, Joel suddenly realizes that he doesn't want to forget--and simultaneously that it might be too late. Trapped in the shifting dreamscape of his fragmented memories, Joel watches his love dissolve--piece, by piece, by piece.
Love takes time but loss is lightning-quick. Loss is the single point in time that divides the world into a 'before' and an 'after,' splicing them so neatly that it's impossible to identify how or when something changed--only that it has. Kaufman's dream sequence identifies that single chemical moment, when everything previously unsaid crystallizes into a conclusion that, yes, this was love after all--or that, no, it never was. He takes that instantaneous transition and magnifies it, finding an entire universe within.
Kaufman's vision isn't slick or clinical, but instead homely and human. If his story is disjointed in the telling, it's because the bigger picture is so big that it has to be seen piece by piece. In the end, every last piece perfectly into place. Kaufman takes the logical inconsistencies of love, makes sense of them and makes them beautiful.
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