Frills Can't Hide That Stuck-in-a-rut Feeling

Sun Herald

Sunday April 18, 2004

Rob Lowing

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

Rated: M.

Starring: Jim Carrey , Kate Winslet , Kirsten Dunst , Elijah Wood .

Critic's warning: Language, adult themes.

Critic's rating: 6/10

ADMIRERS of Charlie Kaufman , Hollywood's most famous current screenwriter, revel in his brand of chatty, affectionate satire.

Kaufman grabbed world attention with Being John Malkovich and brilliantly refined his approach in Adaptation .

But what happens when a writer's idiosyncrasies begin to feel mass produced? Then you get a movie like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. And you remember that Kaufman, minus his regular director Spike Jonze , can produce dreck like Human Nature .

Kaufman's latest has all his trademarks: a lonely, loveless anti-hero (Carrey). A time-bending story with flashbacks and fantastic images. And a premise with science fiction and black comedy overtones.

In this era of revenge of the spurned, inconvenient memories of former lovers can be erased. Depressed introvert Joel is fascinated when he meets blue-haired free spirit Clementine (Winslet) on a wintry beach. But soon they are quarrelling.

He discovers he has been medically ``erased" from her life.

Furious, he decides to erase her.

But embarking on this brain wiping puts him at the mercy of rackety technicians (Dunst, Wood, Tom Wilkinson ) who are distracted by their own love lives.

The best way to approach Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind may be to see it as a tangled riff on modern romance. There are entertaining frills. Funny-abrasive moments include Joel reduced to being four years old and the technicians' callous treatment of their patients.

The cast is excellent throughout. Carrey works his heart out. But he never achieves the angst of a thinking man's anti-hero, the way Nicolas Cage did in Adaptation and John Cusack did in Being John Malkovich.

Eternal Sunshine is arresting visually, bending perspectives as Joel walks out of one side of the frame and reappears on the other. Another sequence has Joel's world disappearing behind him as he replays past meetings with Clementine. All of which contributes to the feeling of unease, as both Joel and the film's viewers find themselves in a modern nightmare.

But all the frills can't disguise a story which feels like a wheel stuck in a rut.

It is a shock to watch half the movie and realise that, thanks to the roundabout structure, the set-up shown in the too-blabby movie trailers has barely unfolded. That could annoy some viewers; there were walkouts at one preview screening.

A lack of momentum was also a problem with music video director Michel Gondry 's last whack at a Kaufman script, the soggy Human Nature.

Kaufman's jokes about the struggles of decent people in a freaky (American) world are so funny that most viewers will last the distance.

But audiences may not be impressed by what is an idly entertaining collage of tantrums, not an involving story. By the time the film reaches its triumphant and rather charming finale, viewers could be too numb to care.