Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
With Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Wilkinson.
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
Only once in a blue moon does a screenwriter who isn’t a director become known as an auteur. Plenty of distinctive movie writers have reputations as actors or as actor-directors, starting with such giants as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Erich von Stroheim, but they’re rarely celebrated for their writing. You have to go back to Robert Towne, who’s done only a little directing, and Paddy Chayefsky, who never did anything but write and produce, to find auteurs known mainly as writers.
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It’s important to acknowledge that Kaufman has become an auteur in the public consciousness, but it’s equally important to understand that auteurism is more a way of viewing films than a formula for understanding how films are created. The screenplay of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is credited to Kaufman, an American screenwriter, but the story was initially hatched by two Frenchmen–Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth. Gondry, who’s known mainly for his music videos (including those for Bjork), directed only one previous feature, Human Nature, for which Kaufman wrote the script, and perhaps it’s telling that the two other features with original Kaufman scripts were directed by Spike Jonze, also known mainly for his music videos. (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which Kaufman adapted from Chuck Barris’s autobiography, was the first directorial effort of actor George Clooney.)
All of this probably sounds hyperbolic and self-indulgent–and there are plenty more outlandish spins to come. But the script and its delivery are so disciplined and masterful that the twists are surprisingly easy to follow. (I saw this film twice, once with the press and then at a public preview; the audience seemed more sympathetic and attentive the second time.) At first Stan and Mary dancing in their underwear over Joel’s inert body on his fold-out sofa seems like a cruel screenwriter’s conceit. But in this movie, execution is almost everything, and the poetic aptness of one lovesick individual being indifferent to the lovesickness of someone else makes the concept work.
