To put it another way Eternal Sunshine unlike most of Kaufman's works is moving in the way it shows us a love being lost: gradually, painfully, with struggle. In Eternal Sunshine Barish was with Clem and it's this relationship, this (Kaufman's reluctance to say the word aloud is infectious) love- and Barish's belated efforts to preserve traces despite Lacuna's thoroughness- that forms the film's emotional core. Not that he's unfeeling- all his films have this intense melancholic loneliness- but that his protagonists from Cuzack's puppeteer to Cage's Kaufman struggle to develop a relationship, to make a connection, the drama being about the attempt to achieve this basic level in human relations. French music-video director Michel Gondry helps Kaufman's script the same way music-video director Spike Jonze helped Malkovich and Adaptation, by making the transitions from reality to unreality (or in this case reality to memory) as palpable as possible: no obvious CGI, a heavy reliance on on-camera and theatrical effects, on understated surrealism.īut more than the imaginative storyline, the opportunity for a director to knock out strange imagery, and the chance for a talented cast to sink its teeth into a fleshy script, there's evidence that Kaufman has finally developed a living breathing heart. It's meant to be a satire on the professionalism of- scientists? Doctors? Therapists? Specialized service professionals? Kaufman isn't too clear as to what these people are supposed to be, exactly, though their hijinks make you wonder about what must go on under your nose while you're on anesthesia.Īll wonderfully ingenious and evocative and expected from Kaufman, whose previous screenplays-among others Being John Malkovich, about a hapless puppeteer (John Cuzack) who discovers a fifteen-minute portal into actor John Malkovich's mind and sells tickets at the door Adaptation, about an unfilmable novel on orchids and the attempts of one Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) to adapt the novel to the big screen- showed that his is perhaps the most fertile fermenting minds working right now in mainstream Hollywood. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) who owns the company, his secretary Mary (Kirsten Dunst), her technician boyfriend Frank (Mark Ruffalo), his colleague Patrick (Elijah Wood), each in his or her own way abusive of their power over the clients. All you have to do is visit their offices (which look like an HMO) sign up for the procedure, collect and turn in all artifacts and souvenirs of the memories to be erased (but what about joint checking accounts, shared properties, or- god forbid- children?), then go home and sleep while Lacuna employees wipe your memories clean. Barish, feeling the need for peace or resolution or some kind of revenge (most likely a wounded mixture of all three) goes to Lacuna to have Clem erased as well.
to have all memories of the affair (and of Barish) erased.
Turns out Clem and Barish were in an affair gone bad, that Clem had gone to a company named Lacuna Inc.
They seem appropriate for each other in the way they're mismatched (Barish is moody and unsociable, Clem aggressively flirty) everything about the meeting feels off-key for some reason, and this feeling of discord leads to the revelation (typical in a Kaufman script) that everything isn't what it appears to be- or everything doesn't stay the way it's supposed to be. It's the story of Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), who one day suddenly deviates from his work commute to hook up with bluehaired Clementine (Kate Winslet). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is yet another product of eccentric enigmatic scriptwriter Charlie Kaufman's brain, a light-footed riff on love loss memory forgetting.
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