Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Reviewed by RUSSELL BAILLIE

Herald rating: * * * *

In Being John Malkovich, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman took us inside the brain of very serious actor John Malkovich and the result was outlandish comedy.

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman takes us inside the brain of a character played by outlandish comedian Jim Carrey. The result is very serious.

Well, yes it is also funny around the edges. It's also about the nature of love and memory and how relationships can affect who we are, even after they've fallen apart.

But Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not the-new-romantic-comedy-from-Jim-Carrey, in much the same way The Truman Show was just a little more profound than anything he'd done to that point.

It takes a lot to get Carrey to shut up and act. As with Truman, a deep and meaningful script seems to be the key. The one behind this is the most heartfelt that Kaufman has written - he also did the little-seen Human Nature (also directed by French music video veteran Gondry), the star-studded autobiographically loopy Adaptation (with Malkovich director Spike Jonze), and the too-clever-for-its-own good Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Here, Carrey plays Joel, a painfully reticent New Yorker, who having found out that his free-spirited ex-girlfriend Clementine (Winslet) has had all memories of him electronically erased at a special clinic, decides as a kind of revenge, on taking the procedure himself.

Only, as his neurons are being scrubbed spotless, he has second thoughts and can't tell anyone. So his subconscious tries to hide his recollections of Clementine in some other part of his memory.

That involves much running around a rapidly evaporating dream-world, tracing the relationship back to its origins while we try to make sense of the long pre-credit sequence which has Joel meeting Clementine as strangers on a train . It's all part of a hall of mirrors that recalls the two Jonze films, and it effectively is told backwards in a way not dissimilar to Memento in its conundrum of reverse-narrative and creeping amnesia.

And it's got a little sci-fi in there, too, the idea that human memory, like computer memory, is erasable. Yes just like Paycheck. But ESOTSM has its thinking cap - in this case a shiny helmet thingamy resembling a space-age hair dryer - actually switched on and set to high-brow.

All that concept makes a compelling mindbender of a story. Though it does hit some flat patches along the way, especially care of a goofy subplot involving the clinic staff - Wilkinson as its boss, Dunst as the receptionist, Ruffalo as a technician and former hobbit Wood as his very creepy assistant.

Gondry pulls a couple too many directorial flourishes along the way, though the film is still a technical wonder of editing and sound design.

It's the equally terrific performances of Carrey and Winslet that anchor the film through all its mental loop-the-loops. They help make this something other than just a clever film of lengthy title, a bittersweet contemplation of how some people - even if their personality flaws aren't a good match - are just meant to be together.

It's the sort of film that can make your head ache slightly more than your heart, but Eternal Sunshine is quite unforgettable.

Cast: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood

Director: Michael Gondry

Rating: M (contains offensive language & sexual references)

Running Time: 107 mins

Screening: Advance screenings this weekend.

Opens: Thursday at Berkeley, Rialto, Village cinemas