Charlie Kaufman, who earned Oscar nominations for his screenplays for “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich,” clearly works best with Spike Jonze, the director of those movies. Jonze has an instinct for visualizing the surreal edge that Kaufman brings to his stories of “Twilight Zone” realities.
But pair Kaufman up with Michel Gondry and the result can be something as problematic as “Human Nature,” their muddled 2001 comedy starring Tim Robbins as an absent-minded scientist who falls for a hairy woman played by Patricia Arquette. As a director, Gondry often proves too literal to express Kaufman’s flights of fantasy.
The latest Kaufman/Gondry collaboration, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (the title comes from Alexander Pope), is an improvement on the first one, but just barely. As before, Gondry loses the delicate narrative thread Kaufman establishes, and the film turns increasingly chaotic.
It also doesn’t help that Kaufman’s ideas have been floating around in several other recent movies. What would it be like if your girlfriend forgot you? Or you were able to rearrange your past? Or you suddenly felt an overpowering sense of déjà vu — as Jim Carrey does in the new film?
Kate Winslet plays Clementine, the cranky girlfriend with what might be called Drew Barrymore disease: she suddenly can’t remember a thing about the guy she’s been sleeping with. Carrey is her anti-social boyfriend, Joel, who is somehow able to rearrange episodes of his life, hopefully for the better — you know, the Ashton Kutcher disease. Indeed, much of “Eternal Sunshine” plays like an unconscious blend of Barrymore’s “50 First Dates” and Kutcher’s “The Butterfly Effect.”
What pulls the movie out of that dim category is the first-rate cast. This includes not only Winslet at her most daring and Carrey at his most subdued, but a notable quartet of supporting players: Tom Wilkinson as a doctor who erases memories of unfortunate love affairs (he’s especially popular around Valentine’s Day), and Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood as his assistants.
As you might expect, nothing is what it seems once the doctor starts treating Clementine, who has tired of Joel and dumps him by eliminating him from her memory bank. When Joel finds out that their happiest times together have been wiped out, at least from her mind, he loses it.
Once one memory is erased, it becomes increasingly easy to do away with more. The clinic does claim to establish a limit, but with Kaufman in charge of the storyline, eventually everything seems possible – which means that hardly anything really matters. By film’s end, the lovers who toy with their memories have become literally so scatterbrained that Kaufman and Gondry fail to make the case for Joel and Clementine’s relationship. To put it impolitely, they’re losers.
Kaufman’s scripts tend to run out of intriguing puzzles, as their down-the-rabbit-hole plots start to wear thin. Still, there are moments toward the end of this one — when the characters come to terms with what they’ve done — that almost make up for the lapses.