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2-D SAMSARA By The World Forgot
By Hannah Dallman
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| WHEN A LOVE AFFAIR ENDS, I’ve heard that a person needs, on average, one week of recovery time for every day that they were involved in the affair. It is perfectly understandable, then, why first Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) and then her ex, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) decide to have all traces of their relationship wiped from their memories by Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), and his rag-tag crew of assistants (Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Elijah Wood). Joel, an average white collar wage slave, wakes up one gray Valentine’s Day morning. He calls in sick to work, for no apparent reason, and inexplicably escapes on the Long Island railroad to Montauk. There, he meets Clementine, who draws him in, despite her lighting-speed mood swings (which change only slightly more often than her hair color). Their initially cute and quirky relationship soon reveals to us its problematic tendencies, which are ultimately responsible for driving the lovers apart and to the services of Lacuna Inc. Joel realizes mid-way through the memory erasing process that once he destroys all the painful memories of Clementine that the good ones will also be gone, and so he begins trying to outwit and outrun the doctor’s efforts, which include a helmet-like device that echoes any gutsy B-movie that involves brain control. From there, Charlie Kaufman’s (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) screenplay dives so swiftly in and out of memory, in and out of one man’s psyche, that it is best left to each viewer to unravel it for themselves. The story is unapologetically tender, ever-quirky, and full of surprises and questions. Jim Carrey, as Joel, is terrific. It’s a rock solid performance that makes his silly crooning of Cuban Pete in The Mask seem like eons ago. The film’s natural humor and odd moments highlight Carrey’s comic abilities, but Carrey drops the silly faces in favor of an exceptionally nuanced performance of a man who suffers from a distraught and confused heart. Kate Winslet, who plays Clementine opposite Carrey’s Joel, is equally engaging to watch. She is vulnerable, mean, electrifying and honest. Together, they’re well matched, and most of us will find something familiar in these characters and their relationship. It might be sweet, or it may make us cringe with recognition, or both. Tom Wilkinson as Dr. Mierzwiak is solid. Mark Ruffalo as his head Lacuna assistant is funny and touching. Watching him peer through his thick glasses at the rest of the world makes us wonder if he’s telling us everything he knows. Kirsten Dunst is believable, though not the strongest of the cast. The side story involving her and the doctor nicely echoes Joel and Clementine’s story, but is not nearly as full. It sometimes strains to be more than a catalyst for the main plot. Elijah Wood, as the Lacuna assistant who falls for Clementine and attempts to steal Joel’s identity in an effort to win her over, never once makes you think of hobbits. Ellen Kuras’s playful, earnest cinematography is beautiful to look at. Every camera wobble and soft focus is there for a reason, creating a wonderful panorama of images as we travel through Joel’s memories and peer into his apartment during the slightly creepy brain erasure procedure. Michel Gondry’s direction is brilliant. This is one of the more successful forays into that tenuous world of discontinuity that I’ve seen. The film attempts to talk about so many things at once, and pulls it off quite nicely. The packed theater at the late late show was evidence enough that audiences (gasp!) actually like to think at the movies. The film's title comes from a poem by Alexander Pope: "How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot. / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray'r accepted and each wish resign'd." The film is like that friend who inevitably asks ‘so, would you do it all over again?’ The answer it seems to put forth is that the decision isn’t so much up to us, but that our exterior experience alters our interiors so that those experiences have to be part of us. The final shots in the movie, of Clementine and Joel frolicking on a snow covered beach, their figures retreating and coming closer again and again is a final question to the viewer. Will these lovers repeat their journey, or will it progress? Is it better for them to have the sea of memories, even if it is destined for pain? Go, see it, and decide for yourself. |
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| Hannah Dallman, wife of Manifest editorial advisor Matthew Dallman, is a graduate film student at Columbia College in Chicago and seems to also know a lot about sushi (judging from her last visit to Boulder). |
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