Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich," "Confessions of a Dangerous
Mind" and "Adaptation)")
puts rubber face Jim Carrey back in the arthouse with his aggravated timeline
pastiche of a romantic comedy in which all memory of a person can be removed
with a computer program. Carrey hasn't been this understated since "The
Truman Show" and his leading lady, Kate Winslet the winsome, is slimmed down
for wiggy adorability. So, if your relationship is going in the cellar, do
you wipe your partner from your braincells and start over?
Clinically introverted Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) takes a solo train trip out
to the boondocks and notices the fetching Clementine Kruczynski (Kate
Winslet). Not being one to come on to a strange girl, even one who goes out
of her way to be friendly, he locks up in shyness. She, it turns out
fortuitously, is the type to make the first move. His obvious vulnerability
and shy reticence knocks her out and her charming aggressiveness leads to a
live-in relationship that eventually sours. Joel discovers to his utter
bafflement that she suddenly doesn't know him anymore. It's as though her
memory's been erased. She greets her former lover in the store where she
works as though he's just another customer.
Joel's investigation to learn how this could have happened leads him to
Lacuna Inc, a company named for a "missing space." In a sci-fi concept that
might have been inspired by the works of Philip K. Dick, the mercurial, soft
spoken head of the operation, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), has
developed a computer program that selectively eliminates memory cells from
the brain, as though it were a mass of binary code. His support team
consists of effusive office manager Kirsten Dunst, and a pair of easily
distracted technicians for the keyboard dirty work, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and
Patrick (Elijah Wood). Leave it for now that there's a whole lot of office
politics and shenanigans going on with this team.
Back to Joel who, now understanding why his estranged paramour no longer
remembers him, decides to go for a little memory erasure, as well. As Joel
undergoes his treatment on a hotel bed, the electronic probe of his memory
cells evokes different parts of his experiences with Clementine, allowing
writer Kaufman full liberty to play with flashbacked time warps within his
zany conceptual framework. So much of the recalled moments in Joel and
Clementines' relationship is positive and endearing, these disappearing
memories builds in Joel a stronger and stronger desire not to let them go and
to appreciate what he had and lost.
In the surreal matrix of Kaufman's labyrinthian juxtapositions, the operation
on Joel's brain proceeds while Patrick bugs out to pursue Clementine and Mary
comes over for a little sex play with Stan, all of which leads to a dire
computer-brain glitch that brings good old doc Mierzwiak to the hotel room
for technical rescue and to our discovery of his very shady, rather unethical
past with Mary. Well, no one said a comforting bedside manner was limited to
the application of medicine. And no one said a love story couldn't be a
multi-dimensional miasma of situational satire.
"The Truman Show" and flashes of talent of a serious nature in more desperate
joke-making contexts has drawn me to Carrey films despite no taste for his
patented broadness of very low humor. Which explains why my approach to his
films is always with trepidation. Here, at last, I found some payoff. In a
totally unbelievable context, he exhorts his inner hero, an emotionally
needful, risk-taking icon of humanity that one can identify with on the
everyman level.
Director and co-writer Michel Gondry chooses a cast as much for their talents
as for their disparate natures to fit Kaufman's madcap mold. The hairstylist
of the production needs to be credited to a great extent for Winslet's great
and constantly changing looks. The actress herself is at peak form,
comedically solid and edgily spirited.
The challenging title is from Alexander Pope's poem, "Eloisa to Abelard":