![]() ![]() To some extent, this is true of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. ( Adaptation is one of the best movies ever made about the maddening business of being a writer and trying to feel your way into a character, a mood.) Without Jonze’s sureness of touch, Kaufman’s scripts tend to come across as a trickster’s fancies. Jonze, who has his own background in music video, made it look so easy that audiences (and not a few critics) often overlooked the films’ depth of feeling. To be fully realized, Kaufman’s scripts-which also include the uneven Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, about game-show mogul Chuck Barris as a CIA hit man-require a director who can finesse his narrative loop-de-loops. Gondry and Kaufman collaborated a few years ago on the rather unfortunate primal-man comedy Human Nature, which was pretty much all concept. Gondry is a celebrated video whiz who has done well by the likes of Björk and Beck Kaufman, of course, is the screenwriter of Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, two of the most conceptually audacious American movies of the past decade. His deliverance is quickly turning into a nightmare that he’s frantic to climb out of. Even as Joel, zonked out and wearing an electrode helmet, undergoes the procedure, he’s struggling to hold onto the happiness that he recollects in jagged, pungent flashbacks. But the movie-which is essentially structured as a love story in reverse-is all about the tenacity of memory. Miserable without her, he puts himself through the same treatment in order to forget her. He seeks her out at the bookstore where she works, but she no longer recognizes him or remembers anything about him. The end comes when Joel discovers that Clementine, utilizing a research outfit called Lacuna, has zapped him from her gray matter. These oddballs are so compatible that the eventual rupture of the relationship comes as no surprise-nothing this perfect was meant to last. This is what happens with Joel (Jim Carrey), a reclusive malcontent, and Clementine (Kate Winslet), a yammerer with tinted hair, who meet in Montauk in the winter and embark on a touchy-feely courtship that involves lying on their backs on a frozen river at night and pointing out constellations. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry have hit upon a novel way to dump a lover: Erase the person-literally-from one’s memory. Forget-Me-Nots: Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine.
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