Charlie Kaufman has always written scripts that are oddball, event sinister but nonetheless interesting. Where he usually fails is in conclusion. His invigorating mind comes up with all these plots that he does not quite know how to resolve. ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Adaptation’ to name two of his more popular scripts. However, with the ‘Eternal Sunshine…’ he changes that by essentially taking the easy way out, which also happens to be the sensible one in this case. Instead of trying to pull a trick over you, Mr. Kaufman this time lets it loose for you to take something back home with you: not consternation but caution.
The first real film by the young quirky French Michel Gondry, is an invigorating and thoroughly entertaining film with abundant material for the curious to be occupied. However, it is also an overly simplified film that almost seems to tell you that you are condemned to make the same mistakes all over again, a bit like ‘Peggy Sue Gets Married’, you are in this world, a creature of habit and will fall for the same thing again and again. So insistent seems to be the film that it has to play its prime metaphor twice: a minor insult to the audience. However, it is clear that what really seems to lie in Kaufman’s cautionary tale is that a memory of an event injures or alters you for life. Taking the memory of an event itself out isn’t going to correct the altered sense of life, if anything at all it will make it worse: an affiliated damage that does not know its own origin.
Kate Winslet is the clear winner of this movie. She is radiant, open and thoroughly in the role. Her growth as a serious actress is almost complete now that she has done a markedly light-hearted role with such competence. She is clearly the sunshine in a film where the characters are often too pulled back and laid out straight to be enjoyable. Take the characters of Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Woods: half-baked characters hinting at the general human folly and dancing around the perimeter of the seminal metaphor but never really registering or participating in it. Kirsten Dunst plays the only other recognizable character and almost warrants the need of the central motor of the plot: removal of bad memories.
That brings us to the once again miscast Jim Carrey. Not necessarily because of what he does but what he does not do. Given his character is a listless guy but he almost doesn’t know what to get out of it. He spoils the magic moments of the movie. The only way he knows to be energetic is by making faces. He is the classic example of a kid who wants to swim because he knows it is good for him but is too afraid to jump in the water because he is too afraid to get wet. He does these films to push his career to the next level but he just stops short of altering his basic comic style even when it is ill-suited for a project like this one. He will need to decide once for all whether he can take a dive or not.
‘Eternal sunshine…’ is a film worth watching. It could have been a great film if the director was just a little more focused on the central theme and was a little more bold. Like, the critic from the ‘The New Yorker’, Anthony Lane, said, a film about bad and good memories and their erosion begs for a long sex scene which this movie, of course, does not have. Probably because Mr. Carrey wouldn’t allow it.
The first real film by the young quirky French Michel Gondry, is an invigorating and thoroughly entertaining film with abundant material for the curious to be occupied. However, it is also an overly simplified film that almost seems to tell you that you are condemned to make the same mistakes all over again, a bit like ‘Peggy Sue Gets Married’, you are in this world, a creature of habit and will fall for the same thing again and again. So insistent seems to be the film that it has to play its prime metaphor twice: a minor insult to the audience. However, it is clear that what really seems to lie in Kaufman’s cautionary tale is that a memory of an event injures or alters you for life. Taking the memory of an event itself out isn’t going to correct the altered sense of life, if anything at all it will make it worse: an affiliated damage that does not know its own origin.
Kate Winslet is the clear winner of this movie. She is radiant, open and thoroughly in the role. Her growth as a serious actress is almost complete now that she has done a markedly light-hearted role with such competence. She is clearly the sunshine in a film where the characters are often too pulled back and laid out straight to be enjoyable. Take the characters of Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Woods: half-baked characters hinting at the general human folly and dancing around the perimeter of the seminal metaphor but never really registering or participating in it. Kirsten Dunst plays the only other recognizable character and almost warrants the need of the central motor of the plot: removal of bad memories.
That brings us to the once again miscast Jim Carrey. Not necessarily because of what he does but what he does not do. Given his character is a listless guy but he almost doesn’t know what to get out of it. He spoils the magic moments of the movie. The only way he knows to be energetic is by making faces. He is the classic example of a kid who wants to swim because he knows it is good for him but is too afraid to jump in the water because he is too afraid to get wet. He does these films to push his career to the next level but he just stops short of altering his basic comic style even when it is ill-suited for a project like this one. He will need to decide once for all whether he can take a dive or not.
‘Eternal sunshine…’ is a film worth watching. It could have been a great film if the director was just a little more focused on the central theme and was a little more bold. Like, the critic from the ‘The New Yorker’, Anthony Lane, said, a film about bad and good memories and their erosion begs for a long sex scene which this movie, of course, does not have. Probably because Mr. Carrey wouldn’t allow it.