Junto Boys

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind


I have been looking forward to seeing this film for some time and finally did see it yesterday on DVD. I must say that while I did enjoy it, I wasn't so impressed as I had hoped I would be, despite the raving 92% approval rate at Rotten Tomatoes.

Ever since being blown away by BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, and fancying myself a bit of a writer, I have followed with interest the career of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Malkovich was directed by noted music video impresario, Spike Jonze, who did a genius job at the helm of his feature debut. Kaufman was instantly regarded a genius as well, and his scripts were brought out of the desk drawer and produced as quickly as possilbe.

Another big music director, Michel Gondry directed HUMAN NATURE from a Kaufman script. The premise was amusing, and the script possibly was clever, but the film doesn't work at all. I came away thinking Gondry was a hack.

Next came CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND based on the semi-fictional (perhaps) autobiography of Chuck Barris, and marking the directorial debut of George Clooney. I really enjoyed this film. I thought Sam Rockwell did a great job acting, and Clooney did a great job directing, and Kaufman's script was good.

ADAPTATION was another pairing of a Kaufman script to a Spike Jonze joint. Again, the result was no less than genius. Despite a bit of confusion in the third act, the story was enjoyable while being delightfully avant garde. As a frustrated writer, I will never forget the sequence in which the Nicholas Cage screenwriter struggles with his tendency to want to include billions of years of prehistory into his backstory of the orchid thief. Every time I get the desire to write a screenplay, I instead get trapped in the research phase, which compels me to read dozens of books to learn as much as there is to know about a subject before I delve into the script. This is not a recipe for writing, only a recipe for getting lost inside your own head.

So, ETERNAL SUNSHINE reunites Kaufman with Gondry, and while the script touched on genius, I was less than impressed with the director's handling of the material. The result is a good, but not great film. I looked up Gondry, to see what this hack was all about, and I discovered that he is considered a visual genius, with an impressive resume of music videos, short films, and commercials. In his short form work, he was the first artist to employ the visual trick that would later gain fame as "bullet time" in THE MATRIX. He may be a visual wunderkind, but it hasn't yet shown in his two features. Neither film is a visual extravaganza, and both of them suffer from pacing issues which often plague a short-from artist stepping up to features.