Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind vs Vanilla Sky

You know, I don’t ask much from movies; just a little originality once in a while. An otherwise ordinary movie can capture my attention with an interesting performance (say, Patricia Clarkson in Pieces of April, or James Gandolfini in The Mexican). Or, on occasion, a bad movie will look really cool, and I find myself watching just for the sake of watching, and tuning out anything else that might happen (the only thing that kept me from walking out of The Avengers was that, well, it was nice to look at.) So, when a movie is original in its execution and performances…and it’s good, I’m thrilled. I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last week. I’m thrilled. 

Eternal Sunshine was directed by Michael Gondry, who has directed videos for Bjork and the White Stripes. He brings this sensibility to the film, with moments staged as if the script were musical. Scenes of running, dancing and driving have an urgency, but so do the simpler scenes of dialogue and silence. I wouldn’t be surprised if music were playing on the set at all times. 

And who loves music more than Cameron Crowe?  

Wait, what? Anyway… 

Eternal Sunshine was written by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, all of which I loved, and Human Nature, which I did not. Like his previous efforts, Eternal Sunshine is a movie without a traditional narrative. It moves back and forth in time, plays with memories and impressions, and blurs the lines between reality and imagination. 

Vanilla Sky is the first Cameron Crowe movie based directly on another source. There is definitely homage in his other work, but Vanilla Sky was based on the movie Abre Los Ojos, and I think that might be where things go a little wrong. Crowe tries to make the film his own, sometimes with great results. Cruise’s sprint through a deserted Time’s Square is amazing, and you just know Crowe has been waiting his entire career to recreate a Bob Dylan album cover. But other times, Vanilla Sky feels like nothing more than the heaviest plot ever. 

What? Who’s there? Who said that? 

 In Eternal Sunshine, Jim Carrey plays Joel, an illustrator weighed down by sadness. His hair is stringy and his shoulders slumped. He walks to his car and finds it’s been bashed by the car parked next to it, and I got the idea that maybe this happens every day, with the dent getting a little deeper, and Joel leaving note after note to no avail. On his way to work, Joel does something unexpected: he runs away, and squeezes onto another train, skipping work in favor of a trip to Montauk.  

Let me just take a moment to say that I’ve not always been the biggest Jim Carrey fan, but I have often wanted to be. The Truman Show is one of my favorite movies, but only a couple times since has Carrey given what I feel is a complete performance. No ad-libs, no funny voices, no mania for the sake of mania. Just Jim Carrey, playing a character to help tell a story. At that point, when Joel slumped into his seat on the train, he was just Joel, and he stayed Joel for the rest of the movie. This is my favorite Jim Carrey performance. 

They scar him up, but the point seems to be, see what we’ve done to Tom Cruise? See? See how serious we are about his troubles? This isn’t a sprained ankle; this is Tom Cruise with an ugly face! This is Serious Drama. And yeah, at the time I bought it, but five minutes later, and during the next time I saw Vanilla Sky, I was thinking that Crowe, and maybe Cruise, must look at messing up a movie star’s face as the ultimate tragedy, or maybe the ultimate risk, but really, it’s just giving us something ugly to look at, if there’s nothing else to go with it. The fact is, sometimes there is, and sometimes there isn’t.  

Where was I? 

On the train, he meets a blue-haired girl named Clementine, played by Kate Winslet. Clementine is blunt and funny, but Joel keeps awkwardly trying to get out of talking to her. He seems to think he’s bothering her, but she’s the one instigating the conversation. Why is he so apprehensive? And what is it about Clementine that is so familiar? 

Through the maze of Eternal Sunshine, we learn that Joel and Clementine were a couple, but things didn’t work out. He was jealous, and she was impulsive to the point of annoyance. He was judgmental, she was shallow, or maybe vice versa. 

Later, or rather, earlier, with friends (David Cross and Jane Adams, who should play everyone’s friends in every movie), Joel comes across a note from a company called Lacuna. Clementine has undergone a procedure to have Joel removed from her memories. To her, the relationship never happened, she never met Joel, and the bad feelings are gone. In one of those fits where you throw out her pictures because you heard she threw out your mix tapes, Joel decides he’ll get the procedure as well. 

It’s here that Eternal Sunshine reveals itself; I was amazed. Most movies like this save the mechanism for their tricks until the end of the movie. The Usual Suspects waited until literally the last few seconds, and Mulholland Dr never officially revealed itself at all. With Eternal Sunshine, Kaufman and Gondry lay their cards on the table fairly early, and we realize the movie isn’t about the stunt after all, but about the characters. Imagine, if, a quarter of the way through Memento, they would have said, “You know what? Let’s not go backwards after all. Let’s just tell the story.” 

Lacuna is a company that specializes in removing unpleasant memories. They operate out of a tiny office, and if the people in the waiting room didn’t have dog bowls or pictures of loved ones, you might think they were there to get their eyes lasered. Lucana is run by Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), and three assistants, played by Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Kirsten Dunst. The four have their own stories and relationships, but each play out in a surprising way, so I won’t spoil them here. Ruffalo and Dunst get the best scenes, but Wood is good too, and actually gets to walk around on his own feet for once. Soon, Joel has gathered up all the mementos (pun intended) of his relationship with Clementine, and the procedure begins, first at Lacuna, and later in Joel’s house, where he lies on his bed while Ruffalo and Wood erase Clementine. 

Cruise goes through a procedure in Vanilla Sky, but instead of setting it up and dealing with it right off, they save it for a surprise. We know something’s up throughout the movie, and have to wait to find what it is. It’s a surprise, because it’s not anything we’ve heard of before, and because it has its origins in another time and place than the rest of the movie. Of course it’s a surprise; it’s been a huge secret the whole time. And I’m not positive his relationships and problems were as huge as the procedure they inspired anyway. 

My head hurts. 

Something interesting happens. As Joel’s memories are being taken away, we go inside his head, to see him relive those moments. The most recent are bad, with Joel and Clementine fighting, primarily over him being boring and her being slutty. The older memories are good though, and Joel begins to regret the procedure. He decides to hide Clementine somewhere in a memory she’s never been, thereby creating a new memory of her that he can dig up later. I can’t do justice to these scenes here, but they are spectacular. From Joel and Clementine reminiscing in a crumbling beach house to them being bathed in a sink as toddlers, Joel’s memories are not only visually impressive, but the emotional center of the movie. I can’t think of another recent movie that puts special effects to such cool use. 

Of course, none of it matters if we don’t believe in Joel and Clementine. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet have created one of the more believable screen couples in recent memory (as far as I know, anyway, my memory is…something’s up, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…). Joel and Clementine are presented as opposites, and that’s supposed to be the point, and in most movies it is. But here, the actors have created living, breathing characters, and we see that it’s not just the opposite that has attracted them, but the fascination of the human behind the characteristics. Like Carrey, Kate Winslet is wonderful in Eternal Sunshine. She never seems wacky just for the sake of being different. Clementine is unique and troubled and fun and impulsive. Kate Winslet has made a career of avoiding the obvious choices and going for more alternative characters (in other words, she weighs in the triple digits and will get naked anyway. She rocks so much, I just can’t tell you.), and here she never disappoints.  

You know, for all her sun-shiny, surf-boardy, boy-bandy persona, it’s easy to forget how many risks Cameron Diaz is willing to take on film. From John Malkovich to Gangs of New York, she’s often unrecognizable, and often quite good. In Vanilla Sky, she’s physically the Cameron Diaz we’ve seen before, but she turns on this creepy Alex Forrest thing and I completely bought her as the villain. It’s a pretty cool performance, and just the right tone to kick off all the confusion and melodrama that follows. Penelope Cruz provides a nice contrast, and is so charismatic and smooth and light that I almost believed that Tom Cruise would go through all that Vanilla Sky mess just for her. Almost. 

So if, like me, you can appreciate a puzzle of a movie, if you like the end at the beginning and the characters complex and the plot blurred, then see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Afterwards, you might give a second look to another twisty movie. There’s one that I really liked the first time I saw it, and I viewed it again later to see if I could spot the tricks. Instead, I got more confused and kind of bored. What was it? I was thinking of it just a second ago… 

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: A
Vanilla Sky: C+