ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

by Gordon

Directed by: Michel Gondry

Released: 2004

Rating: R [language, some drug and sexual content]

Runtime: 108 min.

Main Cast: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo

Rotten Tomatoes: 93%                    IMDB: 8.5/10

 

   I hesitate to admit, but it took a second viewing and a whole six years’ time following the release of 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to know, to really know, that it’s a brilliant movie. Brilliance in this case isn’t just a resulting grade equaling the combination of its parts. It’s a defining descriptor of the parts themselves: the direction, the acting, the story, the soundtrack, and most notably and importantly, the overall artful, reflective quality of every layer therin.

   Teaming up with Charlie Kaufman (bizarrely perceptive writer of such similarly mind-confounding films like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Synecdoche, New York), director Michel Gondry does another impressive job of exploring the unseen, unheard, and untapped psyche of the mind, in this case as it relates to a failed romance between Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet), in a story where the material  proves both powerfully imagined and realistic throughout.

   Before the relationship goes awry, we see it first take a hopeful shape that originates in a chance meeting between the two on the Long Island train. Though Joel comes off as withdrawn and uncomfortable, Clementine, though equally dysfunctional, wears her free spirit on her sleeve, which spurs the two into an unlikely relationship that we all route for silently.

   Yet in one of the most cleverly-imagined ironies to appear on page or in film, we discover that the pair are former lovers at the time of this no-longer-first chance meeting. Clementine, who became unhappy with the relationship, had hired a somewhat mysterious firm that specializes in memory erasure to rid her life of the memory of Joel, and after finding out, Joel had done the same. As we relive these events mostly through Joel’s eyes, we experience, with him, the pangs of regret and inner torture that accompany the absence of Clementine in his thoughts. As he relives past walks, conversations, arguments, etc. with Clementine, the past becomes distorted, bits of information deteriorating all around him, all ingeniously visualized by Gondry. Faces become blurred, streets lead nowhere, a car falls from the sky.

   Subplots then evolve between certain employees of the memory erasure firm, one involving Patrick (Elijah Wood) who begins to date Clementine after viewing Joel’s memories, subsequently copying all the things that seemed to work between Joel and her.

   But the pressing backbone of the film remains the psychology of the romance between Joel and Clementine, a couple that might as well be any other in our own lives. If we could simply blot out a soiled relationship, like a stain on the fabric of our past, would we choose to forget? And, equally thought-provoking, how far would we be willing to go with them if we met them again, knowing we’d erased them in the past? In one scene, Joel pleads, “It would be different if we could just give it another go-around.” Clementine answers, “Remember me. Try your best. Maybe we can.”

IN THE BEDROOM

by Gordon

Directed by: Todd Field

Released: 2002

Rating: R [some violence and language]

Runtime: 130 min.

Main Cast: Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Stahl, Marisa Tomei

Rotten Tomatoes: 94%                    IMDB: 7.5/10

 

   After seeing Field’s 2006 Little Children, I had to see his first and only other major picture, In the Bedroom. I’m not sure how seeing these two in reverse order affected my experience. It certainly made the expectations higher (an unfair disadvantage that would have come true for whichever movie I saw after). While I wasn’t gripped with the same intensity of curiosity from scene to scene as I had been with Little Children, it did touch on a number of subtly emotional nerves, made more impressive by the film being Field’s first full-length motion picture. David Ansen of Newsweek wrote, “Todd Field exhibits a mastery of his craft many filmmakers never acquire in a lifetime. With one film he’s guaranteed his future as a director. He has the magnificent obsession of the natural-born filmmaker.”

   The story’s setting in Mid-Coast Maine certainly contributed to a degree of positive bias I held while watching its characters live and breathe in the serene, willowy landscape that I myself have warmly embraced every summer through the fortune of multiple family cottages. It was a perfect backdrop to Thomas Newman’s beatifully understated soundtrack.

   The film’s initial focus is that of the romance between the young Frank Fowler (Nick Stahl) and the older Natalie Strout (Marisa Tomei), separated from her husband Richard (an abusive and violent William Mapother) and with two young children. Frank was planning to apply to graduate school for architecture, but starts to consider continuing in the fishing industry at home to be near Natalie. Both of Frank’s parents (Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek) secretly worry for the direction of their son, but take comfort in the joy he finds in Natalie and her kids, as well as his defense that their relationship is “just a summer thing”.

   On the sidelines, and not happy at all with the blossoming romance between his wife and the young Frank, is Richard, whose surprise visits and angry lashes of violence directed at both Frank and Natalie come to the alarm of Frank’s parents, though Frank assures them that things will blow over. But after responding to a call from Natalie that Richard’s trashed her house, the two are dismayed to find the angry Richard returning. Natalie is told to go upstairs with the kids, Frank trying to keep Richard out downstairs. His efforts prove unsuccessful, however, and Frank never makes it out of the house again.

   The news is devastating for Frank’s parents, both of whom deal with the tragedy in their own ways, she making her grief more obvious, and him trying his best to get back to a sense of normalcy both in life and in their relationship. The tension between them comes to a head one day in the house, both of them losing their tempers in an emotional display that alone could have earned them the Academy Award nominations they both received for Best Actor and Actress. The confrontation, however, helps bring the two closer and find a more mutual clarity about how to handle their son’s killer, Richard, who was out on bail and only expected to receive 5 to 15 years in prison following his trial.

   The resulting conclusion, played out with chilling anticipation, finds Frank’s father taking justice into his own hands, the kind he believes the courts can never offer him or his wife. He finds Richard leaving the bar where he works one night, and at gunpoint instructs him to drive to his house. The forthcoming attempt at vengeance and its following mental effects (or lack thereof) become the basis for the film’s final tone.

   In many respects it’s a straightforward story of interest and drama, a tragedy at heart, one of human conflict and attempted resolution, and one that Field artfully visualizes through careful dialogue and symbolism, William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer praising his direction for feeling “both highly controlled and effortlessly spontaneous at the same time.” In an early scene, Frank’s father teaches one of Natalie’s boys about lobster traps, alluding to the film’s title, which refers to the rear compartment of the trap and how it can only hold up to two lobsters before they begin to turn on each other. Holding up a lobster missing a claw to the boy, he says, “You get more than two of these in the bedroom, and chances are something like that’s gonna happen.”