Reviewed by David Levinson

THE LOVE STORY, in the most direct sense, is an inherently fickle thing. The problem is hyper-subjectivity – where in its internal circuitry will invariably depend on the viewer falling in sync with the relationship at hand.


Charlie Kaufman is also an inherently fickle thing. Well, his movies are, anyway. While I'll grant that – over the course of four screenplays – he's probably emerged as one of the very few writers who could justifiably be called an auteur, I just can't give in to his emotional geometry. For all his navel-gazing cum self-exorcising, he tends to bury it all behind elaborate little matchstick fortresses of intellectuality. It's 'personal', only in the most streamlined sense – peddling an image; the tortured artist, being devoured by the gnats of his own neuroses. Pathos only ends up triggering the bullet into the foot of self-referentiality.

What to make of a Kaufman love story, then? (Or at least one in which he isn't the recipient of his own affection). It almost seems like a contradiction in terms, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film that ends up amplifying as many of his shortcomings as it dispels.

Joel (Jim Carrey) – shaggy, and equal parts dour and simpering – will be your Kaufman stand-in for the evening. The woman in question is Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), who you can tell is a lot of fun because she has blue hair. The two end up meeting after Joel spontaneously switches trains on his way to work one morning. She berates him for using the word "nice" too many times, but later he ends up going home with her anyway.

It's out of this first meeting that a relationship tenuously arises, and, for one, Kaufman seems to be sorta moving beyond the self-hate motors that drove his earlier self-love pieces. It's little more than a compilation tape's worth of moments, but within which Joel really does seem to come into his own, lured out by Clementine's effusive, unstable yang. And while it's nice to see that she isn't left to nursing the wounds of man-rage (though, elastic-faced awkwardness is another story), she often undercuts her own clumsy charm with a kind of jarring aggressiveness. It usually only faintly registers, but is as good as a kiss of death.

As it turns out, Joel has a problem. Residing in the not-too-distant future, he has Lacuna Inc. to thank – a firm that is able to cleanse the cerebral stains of love-gone-wrong through literally erasing them. After discovering a card stating that Clementine has had him erased from her memory for reasons unknown, he (always the thoughtful one) decides to return the favour. Aside from the case of Clementine's Technicolored roguishness, Kaufman's noisy tonal shifts are the second cause of the movie's emotional short-circuiting. The drafting of the relationship is so barely laid down that it can hardly support this sudden fall into the throes of loss, where in Joel's happy sadsack degenerates into a miserable sadsack. It's fitting that, otherwise, the movie succeeds in telegraphing a wholly contemporary feel. It isn't so much about the pitfalls of white-coat Technology, as it is about our very human desire to sever ourselves from pain.

The descent into Joel's mind becomes a kind of philosophical launch pad, situating this pain beside the nature of love and memory. Beginning at the break-up, and retracing its steps towards the first time the met (the train meeting, as it turns out, was post-erasure), the procedure itself takes place as a cluster of memories enacted in reverse. These provide a nicely graded map of the way the two slid out place, formed along the tramlines of their incompatible personalities. As the initial storm clouds of angst recede, however, pushing towards the corkscrew turn between love and hate, Joel is met with a jolting realization: that, despite the inevitability of grief, happiness – in all of its fleeting glory – is worth holding onto.

It's a conceit which a) emerges with somewhat of a whimper, dulled in falling-domino fashion by the first loop back from love to loss (i.e. with their pain failing to register, how can the release of happiness?), and b) in a way that recalls Kaufman's earlier distortions of the item, at least makes for a pretty cool chase sequence. Joel is flung into a hide-and-seek game amidst the recesses of his mind, desperately trying to salvage what little of Clementine he has left, while shards of scenery blip out around them like malfunctioning holograms. Thanks to Gondry's visual finesse, his mental landscape is transformed into a freeform playground; one where time and space (and flesh) are made plastic. Though not even artificial respiration, it seems, can save this Clementine.

The ending feels so multi-faced that it can be taken in any number of ways, depending on your reception to the core relationship. As the movie returns to and moves beyond the blank slate of where it began, it's clear that pain becomes essential to the way we pattern our lives, with the web of couples coming apart at the hands of self-knowledge. Yet, similarly, there's something almost unsettling about the way not a single relationship works out – as if Kaufman had simply blown-up his cynicism into an entire world-view, with Joel's "Okay" leaves us grasping at nothing more than an airy hope. But for now I'm willing to give Kaufman the benefit of the doubt; if only because the love story, in the most direct sense, is an inherently fickle thing...