Crazy Little
Thing Called
Love


by Shari L. Rosenblum

The memory of all that,
No, no, they can't take that away from me
--Ira Gershwin

Sardonic wit and twisted perception may be his stock in trade, but at the heart of it, Charlie Kaufman is an old-school romantic. He believes in love, fated and true. The kind of love that burned in Heloise and Abelard, the medieval lovers made concupiscent puppets in Being John Malkovich -- and the subject of the Alexander Pope poem of longing and anguish from which the title of his latest film is taken. The kind of love that marks our souls. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry and starring the often impenetrable Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, is an incisive, heartfelt look at love in its purest, surest, most indelible presence. Inevitable. Untouchable. Better lost than never known.

Carrey, gaunt and subdued, plays Joel Barish, an ordinary man: nondescript, guarded, his surname an echo of his solitary psyche. The actor has never been better. If he does not disappear entirely into Joel, and at times, it seems he has -- it is because he is who he is, and not because he does what he does. His performance is remarkably contained, nuanced and complex. Believable even in its eccentricities. Profound in the smallest of gestures. Winslet, as the other half of the emblematic couple, is urgent and dauntless, with hair that changes with her mood and a name that resonates with childhood memory, mercy and loss -- Clementine. Deftly stepping around her character's well-scripted quirks, Winslet gives Clementine palpable substance. She takes the dialogue at its word and transmutes her role from concept to completeness. From the outside, Joel and Clementine may seem an awkwardly unlikely pair, but together or apart, wherever the film takes us, we find between them a human grace.

On the flip side of love, though interspersed with it, even, is pain. Loss. Anger. Frustration. And as commentary on it, and antidote to it, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind posits a concrete realization of the oft-sought serenity of oblivion. Obliterating remembrance of things past so as to annul, blank, blot out, and cancel love's woe. Enter one Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his medical erasure practice, explicitly named for what his patients are left with after his work is done: Lacuna, Inc. People who don't want to remember can bring what they want to forget through the Lacuna office door, in garbage bags or cardboard boxes, and Dr. Mierzwiak and his team will make it disappear. Wilkinson plays the good doctor with a paternal and beneficent bent, but there's a hint of a wound behind his eyes, the burden of other people's heartaches, perhaps, heavy on his consciousness. In the most tender, most revealing moments the film gives him, Wilkinson is unmatched in his subtleties.

But once inside Lacun's rat-a-tat outer-neighborhood office, it's clear we've stepped through the Kaufman/Gondry looking-glass. For all its innovative techno-medical advancements, Lacuna has the faint aroma of a pre-Roe abortion clinic, with cheap, outdated tools (the expunging contraption placed on the patient's head has more in common with the Golden Helmet of Mambrino than with a scientific device) and a staff of questionable ethics and professionalism. Mark Ruffalo, wearing the techno-geek's dark-rimmed glasses in all stages of dress, is the head eraser, Stan. Manipulating memories on what looks like an old 386 laptop, he goes about his task with blatant disregard for the spaces that his patients open to him: their homes, their heads, their hearts. Still and all, Ruffalo manages to inject a latent sweetness into Stan's callousness, and intensity into Stan's looseness, layering his performance with a humanity the character denies his wards. Kirsten Dunst is Mary, the perky receptionist who finds odd defenses in Bartlett bits and pieces for her father-figure boss's awesome deeds. She combines a freshness with a fractured sensibility to shade her deceptively simple role with gray ambivalences. And all the while, Elijah Wood creeps around the edges: assistant, antagonist, cheap imitation; a bit player far from Middle Earth.

Kaufman's screenplay is an adult meditation on forced forgetting after the love is gone. On the regretfulness of faces clipped from pictures, mementos boxed and trashed, albums returned, and love letters burned. On the impulse to wash that man right out of our hair when love has left us standing there raging at the sun. It is a cinematic parable that makes literal the lyrics of countless pop songs, rock songs, blues numbers, hillbilly hits and Broadway tunes; taking them at their most concrete, their most extreme. And with a sophistication that belies the anticipated Kaufman/Carrey silliness, it filters the familiar tension between wanting to let go and needing to hold on and to be held on to -- through weighty and whimsical twists. Under the inspired direction of Michel Gondry (Human Nature), who adapts his music video craft-perfection to give a grounded subtext to the film's dreamy air, and the nimble camera work of Ellen Kuras, who makes the visceral affectingly visual, the film gives memory its own dimension in time and space. So it is, that on a Long Island beach, one Valentine's day or another, it finds a surprisingly accessible crossroads where the physical and metaphysical can not only meet, but intersect, and even dance away together.

Somewhat less metaphysically, Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates also explore the interplay between love and memory. Directed by Peter Segal from a script written by George Wing, 50 First Dates tells the story of a marine biologist whose romantic style is to fiddle and forget them until he meets a woman who repeatedly forgets him no matter how hard he plays.

Reversing the Groundhog Day premise of one man's remembering a day that everyone else lives over and over again, Barrymore's Lucy is a woman who lives the same day over and over again without remembering a thing. This gives Sandler's Henry, who has fallen for her head over heels, the task of making her fall for him anew every single day. Every single day a new introduction. A new endearment. Another first kiss. It is a celebration of romance kept fresh. Especially as the film goes on, seeming, somehow, to grow up along the way.

Starting from the not-so-comic premise of temporal lobe damage, the film takes a few too many, too long forays into traditional Sandler juvenilia, including walrus vomiting, polyamory, genitalia and Rob Schneider; but finds its heart in belief in its own eternal sunshine. Sandler and Barrymore, who worked well together in The Wedding Singer, manage the same chemistry again here, providing now and again the escape of a wouldn't-it-be-nice adult fantasy, and allowing the film's grounded sentiment to overcome its infantile impulses, comic exaggerations and implausibilities.

At the film's close is a dedication from Sandler to his father--and in it you can hear both the boy and the man he's become. It made my eyes fill with tears.

The right director can evoke warmth from the coldest of places -- and derive humor from the saddest of situations. In Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners ) -- who co-wrote the piece with Anders Thomas Jensen -- proves herself the right director. Stepping outside the Dogme95 framework in which she made her international breakthrough, she takes a stark landscape and a pair of brothers, shakes them up with a dose of lost love, and serves it to us dressed to perfection, spiced with  a dark comic sensibility. 

The characterizations are at once keenly observed realities and caricatured imaginings -- and the acting is precise and intuitive. Jamie Sives is divine as Wilbur, the offputting, cynical, and inexplicably charming suicide seeker.  He works alternatingly in broad and subtle strokes and feels as real as anyone you might meet on the street. As his brother, Harbour, Adrian Rawlins offers the security and shelter the name suggests, but seethes with an aching vulnerability. The performances are so dead on that the responses each gets from others seem the only possibility, even in their lack of logic. Shirley Henderson takes it -- takes them -- to the next level as Alice, the woman who comes into their lives and helps crystallize their differences. Henderson knows how to make herself small and afraid, without sacrificing her inner power. It is an understated ensemble cast, with wonderful contributions from varied bit players, and the portrayals linger in the mind.

Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is a film that treats of death from different angles -- intended, accidental, inevitable -- without ever falling into heavy morbidity. It is a film that moves to the beating heart beneath diffidence and distance, but sidles past sentimentality. It is slow, but only on the outside. The emotions develop quickly and go deep. And it makes you smile, and even laugh, now and again, around life's injustices, and in the face of death's caprice -- so that Glasgow in the midst of winter, with death hanging over it, gives forth a life-affirming heat.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene