"Will this procedure cause brain damage?" asks Joel as the helmet is lowered on to his skull. It's a theme which Kaufman extends and syncopates with oodles of clever material. But he finds that he is strangely reluctant to relinquish his memories of the woman he loved, no matter how unbearably painful they are.
Here chief scientist Dr Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) with his geeky assistants played by Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Kirsten Dunst, have painful memories lasered out of their unhappy clients' grey matter, and in a rage Joel demands that they perform the same service on him to forget Clementine. Clementine has had him erased from her memory by an experimental hi-tech firm wittily called Lacuna, which, despite the sensational service it offers, operates out of a bizarrely down-at-heel office almost as tatty as the one which had the portal into Malkovich's brain. After their affair has gone sour, Joel finds Clementine is blanking him when they meet it's as if they've never known each other.
But then we cut to another, calamitous stage in their relationship. Clementine (Kate Winslet) is a beguiling force of nature and poor introverted Joel falls hopelessly in love with her. One day he bumps into a beautiful young woman with dyed hair. He is Joel, played by Jim Carrey: a semi- employed cartoonist and graphic artist. Like Nicolas Cage in that film, he begins with a panicky, whispery voice-over about what the point of it all is, worrying away at his own discontents, which float meaninglessly out into the colossal placidity of the universe. But it is also overcooked and frenetic, with some visual tricks and gimmicks repeated often enough to induce a diminishing return of novelty and effect.Īs in Adaptation, Kaufman has a depressed creative guy experiencing a nagging anxiety about the meaning of life. It also looks like some lost comedy idea by Philip K Dick you could call this film We Can Forget It for You Retail. It's a very Kaufmanesque narrative experiment, technically ingenious and sophisticated. In this case, it is Michel Gondry, who also directed Kaufman's ape comedy, Human Nature.Įternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is suffused with Kaufman's unique charm, his existential drollery, his humane affection for the lonely and vulnerable. tiny little rocks." That slacker epiphany could only have come from the pen of Charlie Kaufman, creator of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and one of the very few screenwriters in Hollywood - perhaps the only screenwriter - whose authorial identity supersedes the director's. "S and is overrated," murmurs Joel, the hero of this comedy, who's goofed off work for the day to mope around the beach.
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