Critics are raving about Jim Carrey’s performance in Milos Forman’s "Man on the Moon." If only they’d wait five years.


IT’S GONNA BE A SAD, DRAB, BUT TRUTH-LADEN, "SUNSHINE-Y" DAY.

Michel Gondry’s "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" probably wasn’t the movie I should have been watching this week. Still, I’ve been wanting to see it for months, and in spite of the plot, I’m glad I watched it.

This easily ranks with "The Truman Show" as my favorite Jim Carrey movie. Heck, this might even place above that one. After all, the actor that portrayed Truman Burbank merely had to be likable. The strange, behind-the-scenes happenings and reality TV conspiracies were more than compelling enough to carry the film. Chris Rock was right. Anybody could have starred in "The Truman Show."

The question is, could just about anyone have played Joel Barish? Shy, sensitive, curmudgeonly, goofy-looking, tight-mouthed Joel Barish? Call me crazy, but I don’t think so. I’ve always felt that Jim Carrey’s performances in his earliest, most popular comedies, had this sort of desperate edge. Here was a man willing to stoop to any lengths to get a rise out of you. Problem was, in order to keep his audience laughing, he would beat his character’s almost improbably moronic shtick into the ground. Five minutes of Ace Ventura doing his "talking out of his ass-crack" bit at the police station in the first film was funny. But NINETY minutes of it? By the halfway mark, I was begging somebody to zap Jim Carrey’s ass with a tazer to make it shut up.

While Joel Barish never has the chance to manipulate his rectum quite the same way Ace did, the same yearnings for human contact, response, and—dare I say it?—love, are there. Jim Carrey has matured since "Ace Ventura" and "Dumb and Dumber." He has successfully undertaken serious, dramatic roles in films like "The Truman Show," "Man on the Moon," and "The Majestic." But in "Eternal Sunshine…," he performs as he has never done before. This time, the goofy grin of Ace and Lloyd Christmas is a mask that conceals the frighteningly insecure Joel Barish. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jim Carrey act with his eyes, but here he does so amazingly. In them, one can recognize the scared little boy Joel never grew out of, the misfit who was always standing out on the periphery of the party, quiet and alone.

"Valentine’s Day is a holiday made up by large corporations to make people feel like shit." This is one of the first things desperately lonely Joel says after waking up at the start of the movie. True, he says it through voice-over, and a narrow-minded film student might complain that voice-over is a sign of weak narrative. But it makes sense to start the movie partially within Joel’s head. After all, once the movie kicks into high gear, almost all of it takes place there.

How does Joel get in there from here? He discovers that his former girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet, playing the dream girl of every socially-inept, goofy misfit), has undergone a procedure to erase all traces of Joel from her brain. Overwhelmed by the callous nature of her actions, Joel undergoes the same procedure, only to change his mind midway through. As the brain doctors use his memories of Clementine as a kind of road map, deleting backwards from their break-up to the moment they first met, Joel desperately tries to hide her by veering all over the geography of his brain.

Childhood events, traumatic incidents, repressed memories—Gondry’s visual flair is in evidence at every one of these stops. For example, there’s amazing use of perspective and trick photography when we visit Joel Barish’s childhood home. In relation to the kitchen, his mother, and Clementine, Joel is the size of a toddler. Proportionally, however, he looks normal. Then there’s the surreal nighttime set, when Joel is chasing after Clementine. He tries to run from one corner of the block, where his car is parked, to the other corner, where Clementine supposedly is. But he keeps arriving at the same car, and the same streetlight, over and over again.

And who could forget that scene towards the end, where Joel, having lost Clementine forever (Or does he not?), sits in the backseat of his friends’ station wagon, and watches as his memories of her literally flit by outside his window?

Since the brain doctors start with Joel’s most recent memory, then work backward, the structure of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" resembles Christopher Nolan’s "Memento." But whereas the hero of "Memento" constantly had to re-establish the arc of his character (He had to constantly try to re-remember where he was and why), Joel is aware of his journey, and is affected by everything he encounters. His arc, therefore, is straightforward. As his most recent memory of Clementine, then the second-most recent, third-most, etc., are erased forever, he realizes how much he loves her, and is desperate to retain some scrap of her.

Was it necessary to review Joel and Clementine’s relationship this way, starting with their break-up, and ending with how they first met? It’s necessary in order to give gravity to Joel’s journey. By the time he arrives at his first encounter with Clementine, which is his final memory of her, he has lost her so many times that, out of some urgent need for closeness with her, or perhaps truthfulness, before she finally fades away, he reveals himself—something he was never able to do in real life. It also helps that the site of their first meeting contains an event Joel truly wishes hadn’t happened the way it did.

"I wish I had stayed. There are a lot of things I wish I had done differently, I… I wish I had stayed."

The first night Joel met Clementine, at a beach party at Montauk, the two of them snuck into an unoccupied summer house. Clementine went upstairs to look through the tenant’s closet. Joel snuck out. The summer house is literally falling apart in Joel’s memory, about to cease existing forever. As the water from the ocean outside invades the house, washes over the floor, and pools around Joel’s ankles, he knows they’ve reached the end. So he unburdens himself of his regrets. He wishes he had stayed with her in the cabin that night. So many things, he wishes he had done differently. It’s a great scene that actually begins a lot earlier, but it has a dynamite ending. It’s the best scene in the entire movie.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" was written by Charlie Kaufmann, one of the most interesting screenwriters out there. He takes off-the-wall ideas, concepts which might seem impossible to present in a popular format, and humanizes them to the point where they become some of the best examples of the popular form. Kaufmann wrote (or adapted) "Adaptation," which I loved. I enjoyed this movie even more. "Eternal Sunshine…" has a more pat ending than "Being John Malkovich," which many imdb posters believe is Kaufmann’s best movie. True, one could argue that "Eternal Sunshine…" has two endings, and the first one is satisfying enough.

But I would argue that ending #2 conveys an important truth which must not be denied: While it would be convenient, perhaps even merciful, to be able to erase every horrible person we were ever unlucky enough to care about from our minds, the process would only leave us vulnerable to making the same mistakes over and over again (See Kirsten Dunst’s character). The truth is, we need the horrible memories, the bitter endings, the regrets. We need to have our minds spotted. We need the pain, in order to grow as people.