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Long keen to shake off the funnyman tag, Jim Carrey finally scores as a sad sack with love problems in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. It's a flawless act, says Joe Queenan

Saturday May 1, 2004
The movie-going public is gradually developing a taste for motion pictures where the story is told completely out of sequence. Memento was a beguiling murder mystery presented back to front, with the additional complication of a protagonist who possessed no short-term memory. 21 Grams focused on three strangers whose lives were changed forever by a fatal car accident; the story jumped backward and forward, in and out, proceeding from the assumption that viewers who had trouble following this kind of narrative had no business being in the theatre in the first place.
Now along comes Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, a strange and in some ways annoying motion picture featuring a story told in non-chronological order, interspersed with extended dream sequences that so closely resemble the reality they are designed to simulate that only the most patient, diligent movie-goers will be capable of following the plot. The film, directed by the relative newcomer Michel Gondry, tells the story of a funky young woman (Kate Winslet) who falls in love with a shy young man (Jim Carrey), but then gets sick of him and decides to have all memories of their relationship erased from her brain via a revolutionary therapeutic procedure invented by a shadowy physician (Tom Wilkinson).
Learning of this, Carrey decides to submit to the same procedure, but with less successful results.
In part because the memory-erasing technique is so new, and in part because Wilkinson's assistants (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood) are incompetent boozehounds, certain images of Winslet refuse to be purged from Carrey's consciousness, and he retains a dim notion that he may have had an intense relationship with a young woman who was constantly changing her hair colour, though he cannot quite remember who she is, where she lives, or what colour hair she was sporting the last time he saw her.
This is the way many of us feel about Vanilla Ice and Vin Diesel: we seem to vaguely recall that creatures with these names actually existed and may have briefly entered our consciousness, but for the life of us we cannot remember when or where.
The central question in the movie is whether the two will ever find each other again, and if so, whether the relationship will work the second time around. In short, boy meets girl.
Were this story filmed with a beginning, a middle and an end, it would not seem especially unconventional. But because it jumps back and forth in time and fuses dreams with reality, it seems weird and aggressively arty. More than any film I have seen in recent years, it demands immense patience on the part of the audience. If you like jigsaw puzzles, you will probably enjoy this film. If you do not like jigsaw puzzles, you will probably find it hard going. Personally, I am not crazy about jigsaw puzzles.
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind was scripted by Charlie Kaufman, who previously wrote Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Being John Malkovich was a hilarious motion picture about a failed puppeteer who discovers a secret passageway into the famous actor's brain, which he then develops into a sort of amusement park attraction. It was extremely clever and loads of fun, with terrific performances by John Cusack, Cameron Diaz and Malkovich himself, but it didn't add up to much.
Kaufman then wrote Adaptation, an even weirder story about a screenwriter who becomes hopelessly engrossed in a script about unusual flowers in the Everglades. This movie was more serious than Being John Malkovich, but considerably less clever and much less fun (it lost its way toward the end and careened into bedlam).
Now, with Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Kaufman has written a romantic comedy that isn't particularly funny, and isn't as clever as his previous work, but is probably more rewarding and enduring, because Kaufman is finally using his cleverness for something other than cleverness's sake.
The movie is also of note because of Carrey's performance. Perfectly adequate in The Truman Show, but dreadful in The Majestic, Carrey has been trying for some time to effect a Robin Williams-like exit from the comedy racket, and this is his first unqualified success. Boyish, vulnerable, and not using any of his trademark rubber-faced gimmicks here, Carrey is extraordinarily likable in the role of the sad sack who cannot quite figure out what is going on around him. Winslet is even better; she dominates the film as the brassy punk that all men dream of bedding but few dream of wedding because men don't really like brassy punks, preferring femmes fatales or hausfraus.
Wilkinson checks in with another fine Wilkinsonian performance; Ruffalo, as usual, is a bit out of it; Kirsten Dunst, as Wilkinson's assistant, is spunky and cute in her predictable Kirsten Dunstian way, and Elijah Wood looks like a hobbit who has wandered into the wrong film, a problem that may afflict him for some time to come.
Gondry, who got his start making music videos, directs with manic glee. There is dizzying, handheld camera work, lots of dream sequences, a general mood of managed confusion. One reason Carrey is so good is because Gondry does not require him to do any long scenes.
The title of the film derives from an Alexander Pope poem about Eloise and Abelard, the starcrossed lovers whose relationship came to an abrupt end when Abelard was castrated. I have no idea why this title was used, but it certainly beats Hellboy.


abrupt – nagły
it doesn’t add up to much – to nie robi większego wrażenia
afflict – dotykać
assumption – założenie
Beguiling – czarujący
boozehound – pijaczek
brassy – a woman who speaks and laughs too loudly and who dresses in bright, cheap clothes, often wearing too much make-up
to careen into bedlam – popaść w chaos
to derive – wywodzić się
diligent – pilny
dim – niewyraźny, przyćmiony
dizzying – przyprawiający o zawrót głowy
dreadful – okropny, straszny
enduring – trwały
engrossed – pochłonięty
Flawless – nieskazitelny
to fuse – łączyć
gimmicks – sztuczki
hilarious – komiczny, zabawny
immense – ogromny
incompetent – niekompetentny
interspersed – urozmaicony
jigsaw puzzles – puzzle, układanka
manic glee – maniakalna radość
notion - pojęcie
Protagonist – główny bohater
puppeteer – lalkarz
to purge – wymazać
to resemble – przypominać (coś)
to retain – zachowywać
Sad Sack – smutas
shadowy – niewyraźny, mało znany
short-term memory – pamięć krótkoterminowa
to sport – nosić
spunky – sexually attractive (about a man)
Tag – etykietka
unqualified success – pełen sukces
vaguely – trochę
vulnerable – czuły


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