Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

rating: ****

the story: A depressed man learns his ex deleted all her memories of their relationship, and so he resolves to do the same.

what it's all about: Jim Carrey is one of my favorite actors, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of his most critically acclaimed films.  So why have I struggled with it for fourteen years?

Carrey became famous after making films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb & Dumber.  He transitioned into surrealist comedy with The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, although they could just as easily be described as existentialist.  Eternal Sunshine was the next evolution from that, and he was never able to go further than that, with the closest being The Number 23, where he played someone with memory issues and an identity crisis.  Again, all this because he became uniquely suited to embodying characters well beyond the societal norm, in a mostly humorous fashion. 

Eternal Sunshine presents itself as something of a riddle.  Mindful viewers will know that we begin actually at the end, and then rewind back to the circumstances that immediately preceded it (my summary), and then dive into his memories as they're being erased.  Carrey begins to outrun the erasure, which provides the most amusing elements of the movie.  But ultimately he can't, and his memory is wiped, and...he meets Kate Winslet, again, for the first time, just as we see in the beginning. 

The whole thing becomes a meditation on the stresses of a relationship, and what will or will not, given a few variables, be deal-breakers.  It's kind of (500) Days of Summer before (500) Days of Summer, with a more hopeful, if ambiguous, ending.

So why have I so long had a nagging problem with it?  Well, for one the Jim Carrey who shows up in it, for long stretches at a time, isn't a familiar Jim Carrey at all.  It's not that he's unidentifiable, but that he's so low-key it can be difficult to remember why he was cast.  And then the sequences where he does resemble Jim Carrey...seem out of place. 

Basically, is this a movie that's weird for the sake of being weird?

It feels like someone's idea of what happens if we turn Truman Show up a notch.  Carrey experiences the erasures as if he knows they're happening, and comments on them, and even interacts with the technicians, to a certain extent, while they're working on him.  All this makes for fascinating viewing, but it can also feel artificial, a movie rather than an experience, and yet the whole point of seeing what amounts to an idea of the "real" Carrey, the one who doesn't need to perform all the time, contradicts this.  Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter known for this kind of material, at least showed restraint previously.  Nicolas Cage talks with himself, Kaufman's imaginary twin brother, throughout Adaptation.  Most of Being John Malkovich is spent with the people using John as a glorified puppet.  The lines are too blurred in Eternal Sunshine. 

That's not to say the individual elements don't work in and of themselves.  The technicians are played by Tom Wilkinson, who leads the team, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Elijah Wood.  These are all reliable actors; only Wood is playing against type, which is something he was desperately pursuing in the years following Lord of the Rings.  But he still feels natural.  We learn, eventually, that Dunst once had an affair with Wilkinson, but her memories of it were erased.  Like Ozymandias's supposed brilliant plan in Watchmen, the effects of the erasures aren't as binding as they seem.  If you're attracted to someone, you're attracted to someone. 

The object lesson is the ability to cope rather than hide from heartbreak.  Wilkinson's wife comes closest, briefly though we see her, exasperated though she is, breaking the news to Dunst.  At least she doesn't try to hide from it.  She's the most rational person in the whole movie. 

In the end, I suppose, this is the kind of story that can't have proper resolution, and so it's the ideas that are supposed to be its effect.  It leaves one unsettled because life is messy.  In that regard it's as successful a movie as there ever was.

But darn it, it's still weird not to be satisfied, from a movie starring Jim Carrey.  This is the guy who made a modern Frank Capra (The Majestic).  He may not be downright sappy, but he usually has more concrete things to say, even when exploring the life of a different Kaufman (Andy), who may or may not have faked his own death as his last and greatest prank on the world. 

Oh well, there can always be exceptions.

The Beguiled (2017)

rating: ****

the story: A Union soldier ends up resting in a house full of Southern belles.

what it's all about: The story began as a book (1966's A Painted Devil by Thomas Cullinan) and then a Clint Eastwood film in 1971.  Sofia Coppola turned it into her sixth feature film in 2017.  It seems befitting for the director of The Virgin Suicides.  And also the star of Miss Julie, Colin Farrell.

Critics seem to have dismissed it as a mostly unnecessary duplication of Eastwood's film.  This is odd, as Eastwood's film really has no lasting cultural legacy.  You can tell when critics can't come up with a better way to dismiss a movie when they start referencing stuff they probably had to research in order to talk about, or otherwise material the general public has never heard of. 

At any rate, I think, as a movie layman, that The Beguiled works quite well, especially in relation to Coppola and Farrell's back catalog.  Coppola's first movie, The Virgin Suicides, was about a brood of sisters who, ah, beguile the neighborhood boys who can't understand what happens to them.  Farrell and Jessica Chastain matched wits in Liv Ullmann's Miss Julie, a 2014 adaptation of the August Strindberg play; it's Chastain who dominates Farrell in that one, although there ends up being a fair amount of blame to go around in how it ends.

Likewise, Farrell is both criminal and victim in The Beguiled.  His Union soldier can't help but exude charm amongst the women he becomes surrounded by, and he leads basically all of them on.  But this ends up backfiring on him when he chooses one of them and by default betrays the rest of them, which leads to...ah, well, nothing good. 

The women are led by a few heavy hitters: Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, and Coppola veteran (she appeared in Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette) Kirsten Dunst.  Between Kidman's and Dunst's characters, Farrell has the most trouble.  He arrives at their doorstep with an injured leg, and reinjures it when Dunst sends him tumbling down a stairway.  Kidman makes the decision to amputate it, believing she has no other choice.  Farrell interprets it as a spiteful gesture. 

In Miss Julie, it's Chastain who becomes totally unhinged; in Beguiled it's Farrell (I kind of wish it had been Chastain, rather than Kidman, who played the matriarch, for that reason alone).  It occasions his best scenes in the movie, anyway.  Kidman channels her Cold Mountain performance; Dunst is again her classic shrinking violet, a role that thrust her to prominence early in the millennium (the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, where she portrayed Mary Jane Watson), and as in her previous Coppola collaborations, she again finds new ways to present it.

The story itself must be considered fascinating.  Even if you fault Farrell for his fate, you can't say it's justified.  In some ways it seems a rebuke from Coppola for the exaggerated emotions running rampant today.  And it can't be a mistake that it's a Civil War drama, in an age where the United States seems to be teetering on schism once again. 

It's a contemplative drama well worth relishing, and a sobering reflection on the battles of the sexes.