The Director’s Label DVD Series of Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry released last year was another step in the growing admiration for music video directors. But just as it offered canonization of these three recent pioneers, the DVDs also allowed viewers to judge whether these men were anything more than inspired visual stylists.

It was Gondry who suffered worst at this re-examination. He was delightful and imaginative, but nothing beyond that, hence perhaps childlike. Music videos may not be required to carry the emotional weight of a short film, but the possibility is there. Having left this unexploited, Gondry’s career as a feature film director has been a hard road on the way to maturity. His most recent film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the another step along this path, perhaps best viewed as a work of adolescent charm next to the boyish fun of his music videos.

However, the strongest element for most audience members will not be Gondry, nor will it even be the film’s star, Jim Carrey. Screenwriter-of-the-moment Charlie Kaufman will be sucking up nerd attention with yet another piece of mind-warping meta-fiction. This is Kaufman’s 5th screenplay in as many years and what once were his preoccupations are fast becoming clichéd rehashes, poor imitations of his own best work.

Carrey plays Joel Barish, an introverted soul who falls in love with the capricious if not mentally unstable Clementine Kruczynski played by Kate Winslet whose pendulum swings of ego and insecurity are as dangerous as they are lovable. In a movie where character is thumbnail in favor of plot and ideas, Winslet fills out her role, giving the audience one true person to relate to. The portrayal is a poetic one. Winslet never fully illuminates her character, but the depth is there, revealed in the negative space of its shadows. Carrey meanwhile pairs himself down to such an extent he seems not so much a quiet, introspective soul as someone with little going on upstairs.

Joel and Clementine break up. Clementine in yet another in a series of rashly made decisions decides to have all her memories of Joel erased from her mind. This sci-fi process, seemingly hijacked from an episode of the Twilight Zone, is comically treated almost as cosmetic surgery, something we might ethically disagree with a friend for doing, but in the end accept as trivial.

When Joel finds this out upon Clementine’s reception to him as a stranger, he defensively attempts a one-up, having his memories erased. But as the process begins, he soon fights against it, realizing that though their end may have been painful, his memories with Clementine are some of his happiest and valuable. To keep them, Joel must seek out unrelated memories to ‘hide’ Clementine in until the memory erasing is done. And so begin the predictable surreal flights of fancy, as Joel’s mind jumps around without order in his attempt to save her.

An interesting point could have been made here about memory, time, subjectivity and reality. The Clementine of Joel’s memories cannot possibly exist. Our minds filter our experiences reshaping them into ever evolving memories. She must in some way be contradictory to the real Clementine, yet this fertile Bergossian territory is left unexplored.

Gondry’s whiz-kid status is reflected in the visualizing of Joel’s brain.

Like Peter Jackson with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Gondry mixes silent film era tricks of cutting and camera placement along with more advanced digital computer manipulation of the image. It works most of the time in conveying the narrative, but whether Gondry trusts his audience or himself too much, from time to time it falls flat. The viewer is lost in beautiful trickery devoid of point. With his music videos, Gondry created exciting symbioses between sound and image but as for conveying much of any point, he was not so much a failure as in absentia. Here, that presence is needed and only a few ideas, as opposed to straight-forward plot movement, are to be found synched with visuals.

A boredom born of repetition begins to set in as the film approaches its final act. However predictable the conclusion may be, it still provides us with all we want out of movies and life: Love conquers all. It is fated and cannot be defeated.

Leaving Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one is left with the impression of Cocteau filming a bad adaptation of Proust, with all the great successes and horrible failures that conjures. Yet as the poet Philip Larkin wrote in ‘An Arundel Tomb’,

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone finality
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

 

                                                                 © THE FILM JOURNAL 2004