Film: Meet me in Montauk

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explores love and recurrence on Long Island

By Anthony Allison

Charlie Kaufman is God. Five years after the creator of Being John Malkovich restored jaded moviegoers' faith in Hollywood's ability to make thought-provoking movies, the most dangerous mind in motion pictures is back. And Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is easily the demented screenwriting deity's most satisfying work yet.

Kaufman's screenplay is based on an idea that director Michel Gondry credits to his artist pal Pierre Bismuth: What if you learned that you've been erased from someone's memory? From this simple premise, Kaufman has forged a characteristically wacky mix of romance, black humor and existential philosophizing that touches the heart while engaging the mind.

When sad-sack loser Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) receives a card informing him that capricious ex-lover Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) has had him expunged from her memory, he visits the New York office of her doctor, Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), where the lovelorn Joel signs up for the same brain-cleansing procedure. But as Mierzwiak's bumbling technicians (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood) begin wiping his mind clean, Joel realizes his memories of life with Clementine, including their magical first meeting on a Long Island beach, are too precious to lose.

In a complete turnaround from Bruce Almighty, Carrey returns to Truman Show dramatic mode, and almost succeeds in reining in his histrionic face-pulling long enough to make the hangdog Joel a hapless hero one can empathize with.

As his outgoing, polar opposite, who changes her hair color as often as her clothes, Winslet makes amends for the sophomoric triteness of Titanic and her hippie-dippy turns in Hideous Kinky and Holy Smoke, returning to a character as vivacious as Iris' youthful Iris Murdoch and Sense and Sensibility's uninhibited Marianne Dashwood.

While Wilkinson's avuncular bedside manner belies the moral dubiousness of his medical practice, his faithful receptionist, Kirsten Dunst, manages the deceptively difficult task of making a none-too-bright character utterly endearing. Ruffalo has a ball as the laughably careless geek whose casual contempt for his patient will strike a chord with any underpaid service industry worker, and Wood vainly attempts to transcend Hobbity typecasting as an unethical, hiss-worthy villain.

Having given himself an almost impossible act to follow, with Malkovich's heady mix of metaphysics, satire and puppetry, Kaufman wrote Gondry's first feature, Human Nature, a paradoxically dumbed-down piece of cerebral slapstick that ultimately felt too convoluted for its own good. Kaufman then unleashed his mind-bogglingly febrile imagination on Adaptation, an audacious riff on the difficulty of adapting Susan Orlean's nonfiction bestseller The Orchid Thief for the screen, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney's directorial debut, based on the "memoir" by "Gong Show" impresario and self-styled spy Chuck Barris.

With his fifth cinematic symphony, the mad maestro returns to a familiar theme of unrequited love: His enigmatic title comes from Alexander Pope's 18th century poetic take on the legend of 12th century star-crossed lovers Abélard and Hélo•se (who, in Malkovich, figured in John Cusack's sidewalk puppet show).

As a suitably pretentious philosophical underpinning, Kaufman uses the Nietzschean notion of eternally repeated cycles as a neat dramatic framework. Like Frederic Raphael's masterful script for Two for the Road, Kaufman's scenario juggles its chronology to add a bittersweet undertone of knowing cynicism beneath its portrait of a fractious relationship, from auspicious beginning to bitter breakup and resigned reconciliation. In a direct echo of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney's contempt for "married people" who sit in sullen silence, Joel scowls, "Are we like those bored couples you feel sorry for in restaurants? Are we the dining dead?"

Given the brevity of life and love, and the scarcity of films this good, Joel's advice to Clementine--as they face the existential angst of knowing how their romance will end before it begins--seems perfectly, profoundly apt: "Enjoy it."