Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
**** - excellent
Too many films tackle the subject of love, and too few of them are really honest about it. It's easy to romanticize the romantic, and most films that feature the darker side of love poison it with blind cynicism. All relationships, not just romantic ones, feature their ups and downs - and whether the relationship succeeds depends on if both parties decide the ups outweight the downs, and are willing to take the flawed aspects of humanity and deal with them.
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry's second collaboration, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, holds onto the optimism. It desires to see the beauty of love, while acknowledging its pain. Call me a dreamer, but that moves me. David Gordon Green's beautiful All the Real Girls comes to mind - and while the film ended with more cynicism, it found the same delicate balance of hardship and glory.
Eternal Sunshine has struck some viewers in a way that other Kaufman films haven't: emotionally. "All brains and no heart," could be a way of describing previous Kaufman films, but I personally disagree. The "headiness" of both Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. (both films Kaufman collaborated with director Spike Jonze) is their strong suit, while Eternal Sunshine is more obviously "emotional" - despite it being just as complex as Kaufman's previous scripts. That complexity may have caused some viewers to just simply overlook the humanity in the Jonze/Kaufman collaborations; the study of failure in Adaptation., and the agony of lust and complexity of sexuality in Being John Malkovich.
Eternal Sunshine's obvious themes on love may have caused many to overlook its status as something else: a science-fiction film. The sci-fi plotline of memories being erased through a scientific procedure has been mainly noted as just that: a "premise", or "backdrop". But the film is no less "sci-fi" than Tarkovsky's two science-fiction features, Solaris and Stalker. Both films generally ignore their science-fiction "backdrops" in favor of more universal themes, the mysteries of spirituality in Stalker, and the numerious themes of humanity in Solaris. Perhaps the kicker for most is that Eternal Sunshine is set in the present-day, but Tarkovsky's long take of a character riding through a modern-day city in Solaris should remind most that the future is now.
Its dual role as a piece on love, and as science-fiction, is why Eternal Sunshine works - just as Tarkovsky's films do, and Kaufman's collaborations with Jonze do: they make you think, and they move you.
Article comments