- Directed by Michael Gandry
- Written by Charlie Kaufman
- Starring
- Jim Carrey
- Kate Winslet
- Mark Ruffalo
- Kirsten Dunst
- Elijah Wood
How can you tell the difference between a comic Jim Carrey movie and a serious Jim Carrey movie?
The serious one has lots of handheld camera shots and blue-tinted filmstock.
No, that’s not fair. Because the real difference is this: Jim Carrey acts. He can act. Honest! I don’t know how good an actor he is — if only seen him do it this once, so I can’t really gauge his range — but he delivers a performance which basically approximates the way in which a normal human being would react to his circumstances.
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“So you want me to kill your wife, and then… wait, I’m confused. Start over.” |
And what are those circumstances, you may ask? Well, Joel (Carrey) wakes up one Valentine’s morning groggy and blue, and decides on a whim to skip work and take the train to Montauk. He putters around in the surf, wondering why he’s there, until he meets a blue-haired girl named Clementine (Kate Winslet, the post-Atkins version). It’s a case of opposites attracting; he’s taciturn and retiring, she’s high-strung and frazzled. There’s only one odd detail: When she asks him not to make any jokes about her name, he’s at a loss, because he can’t think of any. No Huckleberry Hound, no folk songs about a miner ‘49er and his daughter.
From there the action launches three days into the past (this is a Charlie Kaufman script, after all)… when Joel and Clementine were a couple. They had had a terrific fight, and now Joel goes to her work to apologize. But she doesn’t recognize him, and treats him like just another unremarkable customer.
It’s only through their mutual friends that he discovers that, in the aftermath of their spat, she went out and had him erased from her memory entirely, through a procedure offered in a dumpy little medical office.
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What’s funnier than Jim Carrey? Jim Carrey with a perm! |
Distraught and fractured from this news on top of the breakup, Joel opts for the same procedure, one which will wipe her entirely from his memory.
Which is where the movie really takes off.
Much of the rest of the narrative is Joel inside his own dreaming head (this is a Charlie Kaufman script, after all), reliving his memories of Clem as they vanish, only partially conscious of the decision he made, and realizing that it was a mistake. He doesn’t want to lose Clementine so completely; feeling their past together slip away is even worse than losing his future with her. He keeps trying to find away to “hide” the memory version of her inside his head, somewhere that the erasing process won’t think to look for her. But inexorably, she keeps disappearing, and he’s unable to wake up and stop the process from running its course.
In many ways, Joel and Clem are an unremarkable couple, though not so universalized as to become Everypeople. The multitudinous flashbacks show that they each have their own problems with commitment and trust, too willing to lash out instead of open up. Even though they were never married, what they’ve each opted for can be seen as the ultimate divorce — the ability to break off a relationship instead of mending it, and trying to reboot one’s life instead of growing into it. And just like in too many divorces, they consign themselves to living with the flaws that caused the breakup and will still be there in the next relationship instead of working past those flaws together.
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“‘Feel your butt’? I can’t feel MY butt!” |
The moment at which Joel realizes that he doesn’t want Clem out of his head after all, that all of his happiest adult memories are intertwined with her, is bitter and moving. It would be facile of me to say that “You never miss it till it’s gone,” and the ultimate effect of the memory wipe would of course be to remove even the missing of what’s gone; only while he’s midprocess, locked in his own head with his evaporating memories, will Joel appreciate and weep for what he’s been so eager to discard. There is so much poignancy in his resigned plea: “Please let me keep this memory. Just this one.”
It would be very easy to say that this is “an actor’s movie,” given the depth and believability of the performances. And it’s not all Carrey; Kate Winslet is a beautifully flawed and slightly messed-up young woman who reacts in anger as a defensive posture. Elijah Wood is a junior techie who succumbs to the temptation of rooting through people’s pasts and uses his knowledge of Joel’s purged memories to try to seduce Clem. And Kirsten Dunst plays the receptionist of the brain-erasing office; her role is largely sidelined, but she provides the succinct emotional core of the movie when, after having dealt cheerily with so many erasees from the other side of the reception desk, she learns that she herself had her memories cleaned out after an affair with her boss.
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They’re erasing — THE BOOKS?! The bastards!! |
At the same time, this could be called “a director’s movie.” Michael Gondry maintains the necessary balance for presenting such a novel story as this, avoiding both the indulgent temptation to use CGI to render Joel’s mental landscape in phantasmagorical fashion and the snobbish understatement with which internalized psychological stories have traditionally been presented, using no FX more complicated than a matchcut.
But most of of all, it’s a screenwriter’s movie. Longtime genre fans will of course recognize that the “startling originality” for which Kaufman was lauded has deep roots in science fiction, both print and film; John Kessel wrote a novelette in the early ’80s, “Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine,” which holds so many thematic similarities to Kaufman’s screenplay that I would find it hard to believe that Kaufman had not read that story. And I do believe a nod exists her to Dark City — not only do both movies explore the intersection of memory and personality, but both use a seashore as a symbolic lynchpin for reality. Nevertheless, Kaufman is unerringly confident in his use of nonlinear time and small moments making a picture far greater than any individual component indicates, almost the cinematic equivalent of pointillism.
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Is this really the guy you want tinkering around in your brain? |
The best movies are about many things at once; they’re big enough that the overlap causes no conflict. This movie is about the yin-yang of relationships; the most beautiful moments of our life are never far removed from the most painful things. It’s about the necessity of pain and failure in how we constantly create ourselves. It’s about the primacy of memory as our sole enduring possession, a possession so omnipresent and so potentially devastating that its bittersweet pricelessness may easily be overlooked. And it’s about the trajectories of the past that inform our successive presents. As William Faulker said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
(And oddly enough, that quote isn’t in my Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.)
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 0
- breasts: aaaalmost one, but not quite
- pasty male butts: 1
- explosions: 0
- dream sequences: 1 — but boy, is it long
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
- Kirsten Dunst (Mary the receptionist) played “Hedril” in the TNG episode “Dark Page”
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