March 11, 2004

Charlie Kaufman is one of a rare breed… the screenwriter auteur.

We don’t yet know what Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry (or George Clooney, for that matter) will turn out to be as feature directors away from a Charlie Kaufman screenplay. But all five of Kaufman’s screenplays manage to be both completely original and very much of a theme.

Charlie Kaufman, so far, writes primarily about lower-case “l” love. The focus is on weak men, aspiring to the love of extraordinary women. In each film, the man tries to take control of his situation by some odd force, whether entering John Malkovich’s head, socializing the one natural man left, invoking a non-existent twin brother, creating a life (imaginary or not) as a spy or, now, erasing the memory of a romance that has taken a bad turn. In the end of each screenplay, the power of love and acceptance supercedes all else. The one big turn is that in the first two films, the central male character loses while an alternative to his love is found by the object(s) of his obsessions(s).

Of course, saying that Charlie Kaufman “only” writes about anything is like saying the Robert Bolt only wrote about historical figures or that Billy Wilder only wrote about self-involved people. It's too simple.

Simplicity is what is missing from the production of Charlie Kaufman’s latest produced script, perhaps his best, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Of all five films, this one has the most easily explained central premise. What might happen if you could have true-love-derailed erased from your mind to ease the pain?

Other reviews have given away details of the journey of the film, but there is nothing about the journey that you should know going into the theater, outside of that basic premise. The utter thrill of discovering the surprises of story structure, character developments, etc, is easily destroyed by even as much information as what procedures take place in the story. Avoid all spoilers if you are serous about getting to this movie in its first weeks.

That said, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind breaks my rule – my brand new, rarely challenged rule – of great talents. One auteur per movie.

When you watch Spike Jonze’s collection of videos, you can see the range of which he is capable. Give him a non-Kaufman screenplay and he will deliver something fascinating. But his genius in working with Kaufman has been giving Charlie’s unique visions their space, instead of competing with them. It’s not to say in any way that Spike has not brought a huge amount of his own creativity to Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. In fact, the decision that the two men made together to keep the third act “action sequence” down to the intimate chase it is instead of going all Bruckheimer on us may have cost them with some viewers. But it was, in my opinion, the daring and right decision for them and for the film.

Michel Gondry’s work on Eternal Sunshine reminds me of Julie Taymor’s work on Frida. Gondry is a magical director. His hand is steady and his voice is clear… much like Taymor, who proved as much with the terribly underappreciated Titus. (“Good old day” reminiscers would be hard pressed to top Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, Branagh’s Henry V, Loncraine/McKellan’s Richard III and Taymor’s Titus in the history of filmed Shakespeare.) But Taymor – perhaps spurred by the production’s inability to get rights to original works by Frida Kahlo – constantly seemed to be using her artistic skills to top Kahlo’s artwork, as though Kahlo was not really enough.

Watching Eternal Sunshine a second time, with all of its mysteries exposed, it was even clearer than it was the first time. Kaufman’s themes, so brilliantly balancing pinpoint simplicity and stunning structural complexity, were poorly served by Michel Gondry’s tendency to lose focus, wallowing in his own skills.

For instance, not to be too simplistic, I would defy anyone to distinguish visual styles between the dream state and the waking state in the film. Actions that happen within either are different. And it could be argued that the lack of differentiation contributes to Gondry’s goal of disorienting the audience. But does a disoriented audience serve the story or the ego of the director?

It’s almost impossible to explain this properly to someone who hasn’t seen the film, since Gondry’s work is very entertaining, Carrey and Winslet are magnificent and Kaufman’s script is still there. But in the last ten minutes of the film, it goes from amusing to magically emotional… and it’s not just because we finally got to the punchline. It is because we finally get a chance to breathe with these characters, not constantly being distracted by visual bells and whistles. The fog that permeates so much of the movie is getting in the way of seeing the heart of this movie.

As the film came to an end last night, in my second viewing, I was acutely aware of how much I cared for these characters and how much I had wished the film had just calmed down enough for me to spend some more quality time with them. It’s not like Kubrick or even Adaptation, where there is a lot of subtext to figure out in multiple viewings. Time does shift in the film, but Joe Moviegoer should have no trouble keeping up. But even having seen the film before, I spent a fair amount of time considering how what was happening at any given moment fit into the overall context of the film.

And in all that visual confusion, greater depth in storytelling was lost. For instance, if a character appears in another character’s dream state, is that character controlled by the dreamer or by the perceived behavioral mode of that character by the dreamer or is the character somehow independent in the dream? Yes, the whole idea is hyper real. But these kinds of subtextual issues are at the core of most acting performances and indeed, at the core of the audience’s experience of a story.

I can’t say I was ever bored by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Not the first time or the second. This is the Kate Winslet that made me fall in love with her as an actress over the years. Carrey is just right, never too much, never caught trying to “Act.”

My instinct is to scream that Michel Gondry should never be allowed to direct a Charlie Kaufman screenplay ever again. But this effort is far better than Human Nature, so maybe the third time would be the charm. But instinctually, I feel like Gondry should do something more like Marcus Nispel did on Texas Chainsaw Massacre… a simple, clean story where his strong style tendencies took things up a notch instead of getting in the way of the real auteur of all Kaufman films, the screenwriter.

One can feel the fingers of this film grabbing for your heart from the very beginning to the very end. But it never quite seizes you until the end. That is what regular moviegoers, the ones who pay money, are looking for and what will have to happen in order for word-of-mouth to reach past the coasts’ big cities. And by process of elimination, the agent of the unfortunate distance is Gondry’s exercise of style.

Truth is, it’s heartbreaking. Because in the end, for those who embrace the truth of our humanity, this is one of the most romantic films you will ever see. If only there weren’t so many flowers in the room.

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