After doing Bollywood rip… er… remakes of Hollywood thrillers last week I decided I really needed to clear my palette. I decided to do this with the films of Charlie Kaufman. I’d seen Being John Malkovicth and enjoyed the whacky surrealism of it so seeing a few more of them that I’d heard good things about.
I’d put off seeing an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for a long time for numerous reasons. I think the big reason was Jim Carrey. Based on the kind of films he’s usually in I have a tendency to assume it’s a comedy until told otherwise. The other reason being while I try to keep the individual separate from their works there are a few things that make them cross the line for me… being a spokesman for the antivaxxer movement is one of them.
So despite all of this I eventually heard that it was not a comedy and it was indeed the kind of hard science fiction that I like the kind I like the kind that people don’t realize is science fiction due to the absence of space ships. Films like another Carrey Film the Truman Show…. The Truman Show’s science fiction? People ask when I say this. It has an Arcology you can see from orbit; of course it’s science fiction.
Eternal Sunshine deals with the story of Joel Barish a shy dull man and the love of his life Clementine, played by Kate Winslet, a manic, self-destructive free spirit. When she breaks up with him she then has her memory of him wiped by a psychiatric clinic specializing in a form of laser guided amnesia. (okay no lasers involved but you get the idea. Out of spite he decides to have the same process used on him from there we witness an inner journey through his memories of his relationship as they fall apart around him. As this goes along he realizes he wants to keep these memories and struggles to keep even the slightest memory of Clementine even if based on their personalities they’re relationship may be the same disaster a second time.
The next on my list, Adaptation, starts as a story about writer’s block. Charlie Kaufman had been hired to write a film adaption of “The Orchid Thief “. Getting nowhere he ended up writing the story of not being able to write about it. This culminates into a quest for meaning in a story that is pretty much just about flowers and if you can’t think of that adapt it into something more shallow and visceral.
What we get is a very self deprecating self portrait of Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage in what I think is one of his last performance, as a neurotic mess trying to find meaning in his life and his art. Cage also plays Kaufman’s fictional free spirited twin brother, who I kept having the sneaking suspicion was also a figment of Kaufman’s imagination within the film as well.
The play also goes back and fourth to the text of the Orchid Thief with a story of a New Yorker reporter played by Meryl Streep getting a story from the titular Orchid Thief wonderfully played by Chris Cooper. But as Kaufman’s writers block on the subject this plot turns into a weird thriller, which the Kaufman brothers are drawn into as well.
