kate winslet eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

He can’t help writing clever, which is fine, but that often leaves characters stranded like chess pieces. But the Carrey/Winslet doomed romance is Eternal Sunshine’s narrative backbone, even as Kaufman errs on the side of the clinical and aloof. Adaptation.’s touching scenes between Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper got lost in the meta-gobbledygook. It helps that he’s working from Kaufman’s most humane script to date. Gondry is astute and clever, a technical maestro with the flourish of a choreographer. James Joyce might have applauded this Phil Dick-caustic/Gnostic rendition of his Nighttown from Ulysses, with Clementine as Joel’s face-changing Penelope/Molly Bloom. Joel’s memories go backward in time from the last gasp of their love to their initial spark, but there are sideways detours along the way that take him to infancy and memories of his first childhood humiliation. Carrey and Winslet run through self-obliterating landscapes, are jump-cut from various Bergman-style evocations of a deteriorating relationship, and find themselves in apartments crossed with seascapes, larger-than-life Alice in Wonderland kitchens, Escher-like bending walls and Francis Bacon mutations. Washed-out realism gives way to vivid splashes of surrealism, and the labyrinth of Joel’s mind becomes an awe-inspiring collage of mad visions. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson, whose bedside manner and medical detachment is both comforting and dark) and his geek-chic trio of assistants (Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood) put Joel through erasure, the bottom falls out of Eternal Sunshine. Introverted nice guy Joel (Jim Carrey) hears of an experimental procedure to erase troubling memories, and dives right in when his impulsive girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) washes her brain entirely clean of their love-shattered relationship. but more reality-bending than your average Philip K. Working from a Charlie Kaufman script, Eternal Sunshine is less meta than Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Brush all those memories aside, though, because the very hallucinogenic quality of his videos perfectly melds with the director’s seemingly fleeting attention span in Eternal Sunshine, where his faults as a storyteller are directly tied to the film’s strengths.

Unlike his mentor Spike Jonze, Gondry seemed uncomfortable dealing with actors, garnering colorful but one-dimensional performances from Patricia Arquette and Tim Robbins. Human Nature, his first attempt at narrative long-form, was a series of beautiful illusions that never really cohered. Brilliant music video director Michel Gondry (Björk’s weapon of choice) hits his stride on his second feature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Kate winslet eternal sunshine of the spotless mind