My memory is terrible. Ask anyone-when it comes to remembering anything that happened before yesterday, I'm at a total loss. With a little prompting, the memory usually comes flooding back, but for the most part, it takes a lot of work to keep any memories at the surface. You can imagine this isn't the best quality in a relationship. I appreciate that my girlfriend hasn't tossed me to the curb yet, considering the numerous times she says \Remember the time we..."" and, well, I don't remember the time.
Charlie Kaufman, bless his surreal heart, has made ""Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"" something far more than I expected, and it all taps into those memories I have so much trouble holding on to. After nine months of waiting, filled with watching trailers and reading script reviews, I finally got a chance to take my girlfriend to ""Sunshine"" and it hit me with a punch that I didn't know Kaufman had in him. Walking out of the theater, I loved it-and more surprisingly, so did she. We had dinner and went for a walk after, but I couldn't stop smiling, all because of something ""Sunshine"" had put in my head.
Kaufman, the screenwriter behind ""Being John Malkovich"" and the ingeniously layered ""Adaptation,"" led me to expect something quirky and different. But putting aside the boggling conceptual skill Kaufman had displayed in previous scripts, I also expected something a little distant. His use of meta-commentary, layering stacks and stacks of meaning and devices on top of one another usually comes off like a wink to the audience-an intellectual ""cookie"" for those of us who follow it. Smart, intense, innovative-but ultimately, ""Adaptation"" and ""Being John Malkovich"" didn't resonate as much as truly, truly great screenplays should.
Teaming with director Michael Gondry, Kaufman's ""Sunshine"" is a beautiful new step for the screenwriter. The concept is fairly straightforward: Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) have a nasty fight and break up after two years together. Clementine somehow hears about Lacuna Inc., a company that administers memory erasures, and decides to forget Joel-literally. When Joel sees her next, she has no idea who he is, and when he finds out about the procedure, he goes in for it too. The problem is, while they are erasing Clementine, he decides he does not want to wipe her from his life after all.
But Kaufman and Gondry are not the types to tell any story in a simple manner, and this is definitely a film that benefits from their odd style. ""Sunshine"" jumps around from end to beginning and from reality to Barish's head-which replays each Clementine memory, from fight to first sight, as it is being erased. Unlike ""21 Grams,"" which suffered because of the distracting-and increasingly popular-use of nonlinear editing, ""Sunshine"" is still easy to follow as long as you pay attention.
But still, I knew all this going into ""Sunshine."" I knew the basic story and I knew it would be a bit of a trip, because, after all, this is a Kaufman movie. But somewhere in there, Kaufman gave this couple a heart and soul that wasn't there in his other films. Joel and Clementine's relationship is filled with these awkward and disturbingly real moments that make them seem like a real couple. This relationship is so well established that the themes Kaufman wants to get at all flow through them, rather than on some higher intellectual plane that he has to concoct. We see in Carrey's eyes a fear of losing the best moments with Clementine, like lying on their backs on a frozen river, or meeting at a beach party as two loners.
And that's what the film is about in the end. The acting by Carrey and Winslet is absolutely superb, and the directing tricks Gondry pulls out are astoundingly effective (watch the books slowly erase to white in Barnes and Noble). But among the many themes addressed in ""Sunshine,"" the preciousness of our memories, those little moments where you're so in love that you could die, hit me the most. It's a reminder that even when you're terrible at remembering things, some of them are worth the effort.
Especially if you like conversations about '80s paraphernalia, barbeque chicken pizza at The Great Dane, walks by Lake Mendota in March and a girl named Haley.
wwtemby@wisc.edu.
