Mind fields
Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explodes romantic comedy.

By Susan Gerhard

A GLANCE AT the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman might lead you to believe he's at war with reality. John Cusack and friends joyrode into an upmarket mind in Being John Malkovich, Kaufman's first major film with Spike Jonze. Patricia Arquette and Rhys Ifans escaped civilization's discontents for the bestial woods in Human Nature, his first collaboration with Michel Gondry. Kaufman invented an alter ego and took him on a publicity tour for Jonze project number two, Adaptation, Kaufman's freak-out over having to turn a Susan Orlean story into a screenplay. And with his new Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman gives two characters the chance to erase one another from their love-stung psyches. Zoloft is not strong enough to ease this kind of pain, so Kaufman and Gondry have invented a medical procedure, a surgical strike on memory, a targeted bombing of the brain, to do it for them.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind borrows its title from an "Eloisa to Abelard" line, by Alexander Pope, which alludes to the happiness to be found in naïveté. The line is naively quoted by a character in the film who doesn't realize she's had her memory erased. But Pope's unquenchable lover Eloisa gets her revenge on the character's misreading as the film proceeds to rip the idea of unearned happiness apart, limb by limb.

The truth is, reality is not something to be escaped in these films, which I learned in a short conversation with Kaufman and Gondry last week. It's something to be rebuilt, one dream at a time. Kaufman, film's least categorizable writer, and Gondry, MTV's most inventive tinkerer, are attempting to reassemble a fantastic world that may be less familiar but is, in the end, much more authentic. They bring real humor back to romantic comedy and even manage to convulse the too common time-twisting, memory-reconfiguring plot device into wacky new shapes in the story of a man, a woman, and a breakup.

"When you're young, movies seem real," said Kaufman, who admitted he actually felt damaged by Hollywood movies. "They're very seductive, and you want to be involved in that world. You think you are missing out. But now I know that the world is much more interesting than those movies; there are things to discover in the chaos and complexity and frustration of human interaction that are much more exciting to think about."

To Kaufman's universals of chaos, complexity, and frustration, add titillation and the stoned, blank-faced, nubile Kirsten Dunst, and you have a scene: as in a morose man (Jim Carrey) stationed in his bed with electrodes on his head, having his memory of his girlfriend (Kate Winslet) erased, when the technician (Mark Ruffalo) becomes distracted by the receptionist (Dunst) who just stopped in to strip in front of her coworker. Oops. The patient's mind has just fallen off the map. Please call the head doctor (Tom Wilkinson), so that more chaos, complexity, frustration, and titillation ensue – while the patient, in his momentarily untrackable mind, is rediscovering the higher meaning of love, which he's now determined not to have erased. It's petty medical malpractice at least as funny as Lars von Trier's Kingdom crossed with the sincerity of, well, Kaufman. Are there any comparisons?

Kaufman, who's worked with Jonze and Gondry twice (few screenwriters have good enough experiences with directors, and vice versa, to get repeat jobs), has been lucky enough to find directors who understand him. Both he and Gondry shiver at the memory of 2002's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a script they said floated around Hollywood for a long time before George Clooney got his paw marks all over it. Kaufman says he was cut out of the process when Clooney rewrote the script and miconstrued its intentions. Clooney's most egregious change: refusing to use the inflatable airplane Kaufman's script had sailed over the Berlin Wall. "They said it was not realistic, that no one would believe it," Kaufman said with a groan. "But it is real – I found it in a CIA book. It was actually used!" Gondry added, "They would say to you, 'We don't care if it's real, we only care what people will think.' Which is stupid. Reality is so much more surprising."

Surprise is Gondry's specialty: the boy pulling a condom out of his circa-1900s watch pocket in his award-winning Levi's ad; Kylie Minogue cloning herself as she does happy, poppy laps through a neighborhood in the "Come into My World" video; the hand of Dave Grohl growing outsized in a nightmare for the Foo Fighters's "Everlong"; the mummy-robot-disco girl choreographic ode to Michael Jackson videos for Daft Punk's "Around the World"; and best of all, probably, the simulvision presentation of two intersecting stories, fun-house mirror-imaging each other for Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water."

Gondry is the engineer who thrust Eternal's memory-erasure-as-breakup idea into Kaufman's hands, then turned the screenwriter's words into the strangest of realities. Those who feel Gondry's enormous talent for commercials and music videos isn't translating into features (though I loved the fresh and vaguely Björkian vision of his first feature, Human Nature) need to step into this one to see that the dots – Carrey under a table whining to be hugged by his mother, a wooden house on a beach that falls apart (a Gondry favorite) – truly do connect. You might say getting audiences to accept the concept of a man fighting memory erasure psychically speaking to his to-be-erased ex is even more difficult to float than an inflatable airplane over the Berlin Wall.

The rule with Gondry and Kaufman, however, is that the crazier it first appears, the more believable they can make it feel. By sticking to fundamental emotional truths, these two prove you can deconstruct love while still being drawn to it. Some couplings are just meant to be, and so are some miseries.

'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' opens at Bay Area theaters Fri/19. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.