DIRECTED BY: Martin Scorsese

FEATURING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams

PLOT: A U.S. Marshall with a tragic past investigates a mysterious disappearance at an

asylum for the criminally insane on a craggy, isolated Massachusetts island in the 1950s.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Scorsese sprinkles a few flakes of weirdness into his mainstream thriller for flavor, but it’s carefully tailored for the mild tastes of the masses.

COMMENTS:  Atmosphere and suspense rule as Scorsese leaves film’s mainland to investigate the genre islands.  With a horror movie aesthetic, a film noir hero and a brainteaser mystery plot, Shutter Island is a mini-history of popular movie mechanics, with some psychology and dark drama thrown in to provide a sense of gravitas.  It’s no masterpiece, but it does effectively draw you into its mysterious labyrinth for two hours.  Overwrought in the best way, this is the type of movie where portentous strings keep coming at the viewer like driving sheets of rain in a hurricane, key scenes take place in darkened cells filled with the criminally insane or in ruined cemeteries, and Nazis, lobotomizing surgeons, and drug-induced hallucinations all play a part in the paranoid plot.  DiCaprio puts in a fine performance as Teddy Daniels, a tough guy whose callous exterior may just be scar tissue from the wounds he’s suffered in a tough life.  A war veteran who was present at the liberation of the Dachau death camps, Daniels may have committed acts that still haunt him; returning home, he turns to booze and then quickly suffers further tragedy when he loses his young wife to a violent tragedy.  Guilt, regret and lust for revenge haunt our hero, and impede his investigation of the murderess who’s disappeared from her locked cell as surely as does administrator Ben Kingsley’s odd reluctance to hand over patient medical files to the two federal marshals.  Scorsese plumbs DiCaprio’s psyche for spooky dream sequences, such as one where he embraces his dead wife while ash falls around them like snow; as the scene progresses her back turn into a burning cinder, while a cascade of blood simultaneously soaks the front of her dress.  As the flick progresses, reality becomes plastic and the seeming illogic of the plot increases; DiCaprio’s flashbacks and dreams take up a larger portion of the action and sometimes bleed into the real world.  Despite a mounting sense of weirdness, though, all is resolved rationally at the end.

You may guess the final twist, or you may not.  The true test of a mystery/thriller is not whether the twist ending surprises you—it’s a bonus if it does and will make the movie a classic, but there are only so many unthought-of tricks that a director can deploy without cheating.  Our capacity to be surprised depends more on cinematic inexperience than anything else.  The true virtue of a thriller is not to fool us but to put us inside the endangered shoes of the protagonist, and fill us with doubts as to our safety, understanding, even sanity.  When this movie’s clicking, the suspense is high and the Gothic atmosphere is thick and beautiful, making it well worth the short ferry ride out to Shutter Island.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com (contemporaneous)

“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 …”–Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

DIRECTED BY: Michel Gondry

FEATURING: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson

PLOT: A shy introvert named Joel and a kooky gal named Clementine with ever-changing hair colors meet and fall in love.  After a fight Joel tries to reconcile, but discovers Clementine has availed herself of a strange and anachronistic mind-erasing technique to remove all memories of him; in a fit of pique and pain, he decides to undergo the same procedure.  But as Joel begins the erasure process, he realizes he doesn’t want to go through with it, and he travels through the landscapes of his memories to find and hold on to the rapidly vanishing Clementine.

BACKGROUND:

• Charlie Kaufman came up with the idea for this fascinating tale and co-wrote the script with the help of director Michel Gondry and obscure Parisian performance artist Pierre Bismuth.
• The title is taken from the classic Alexander Pope poem Eloisa to Abelard, which reflects a number of philosophical and emotional touchstones of the film.
• Before Jim Carrey expressed a desire to play Joel, the likeliest candidate for the part was Nicolas Cage (!)
• The scene where Mark Ruffalo scares Kirsten Dunst is completely genuine: director Gondry asked that before each take that Ruffalo hide in a different spot to really scare the pants off her!

INDELIBLE IMAGE: This bold and invigorating trip into the subconscious has a myriad of off-the-wall images that are sure to stick in your head. From faceless creatures to over-sized environments to entire train stations being drained of its inhabitants due to memory loss, there is a lot of weirdness going on here.  But as far as an indelible image, the one I pick is the simple scene in which Joel remembers when he and Clementine snuggle beneath an old ratty blanket and he consoles her after she recounts an intimate and revealing story about a doll she named after herself as a child.  As the memory seeps out of his head and Clementine’s body disappears, Joel crawls through the ratty blanket of his imagination begging to be able to hold on to this particular memory.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Any film birthed from the madcap imagination of Charlie

Original trailer for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Kaufman and surreal visualist Michel Gondry has at least a pretty good shot of being kind of different.  But this movie in particular, a film about memories literally being erased from people like they were organic hard drives, really takes Kaufman’s dry strangeness and Gondry’s unhinged wild-eyed wonderment and melds it to a delightful perfection that muses on life while simultaneously compelling us with images of collapsing landscapes and Jim Carrey bathing in a sink.

COMMENTS: Some would say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie about
the heart, while others would say it’s about the mind, and still others would say it’s about the soul.  That so many people have such diverse opinions on it speaks volumes, especially when one considers the crux of the movie for a moment: Joel and Clementine are simply two lovers who have opted to forget about one another, albeit with their fair share of doubts left behind.  On the surface, it appears to be little more than a quirky romantic drama, and even with the fabulous imagery it still maintains its simple core of a love regretted.  What makes this different than something you would find in the indie film bargain bin is an intelligence and a philosophy behind it that not many other features can boast.

It is a film that speaks to the sad core of a relationship.  Joel and Clementine’s romance is dysfunctional in its optimism.  It is a love that is woefully mismatched and tries to work against it, and the film succeeds in showing the heartache of the divide between two very different people who care for each other.  Clementine is a punky extrovert, wearing her emotions on her sleeve with a loud mouth and wacky colored hair.  Joel is much more insular, opting to watch his carefree spirit from afar.  Their personalities don’t exactly compliment each other, which explains their later tensions and eventual dissolution.  Most films would gloss over the details of such a mismatch and assume that love conquers all, but the gulf between these two and how it weathers a love over time is a refreshingly realistic touch for a movie draped in the fantastique.

What a fascinating idea.  A concept like this, in the wrong hands, could have ended disastrously, but in the capable grasp of Gondry and wunderkind Charlie Kaufman, this film came out almost flawlessly.  You are transported to a world of dreamlike memories that fall away in the face of a procedure that begins to look more and more like a terrible mistake.  It’s as terrifying as it is tragic, and its inevitability bears down upon our hearts every second, even though we still secretly hope for a second chance between Joel and Clementine.  The world inside Joel’s mind is equally impressive as a visual spectacle.  The way the memories manifest themselves—be they half-remembered words and ideas, sketchy faces, childhood fears revisiting the adult manifestation of Joel, or endless loops of seemingly unimportant details—all are lovingly rendered in a style that is both technically impressive and emotionally stirring.

This sumptuous feast for the mind is bolstered by breakout performances by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.  While I never expected any less from real-deal actress Winslet, Carrey genuinely surprised me.  As Joel, he made me feel so deeply for him that it shook me to my core as an ol’ softie.  There is such a vulnerability there that I never saw before, never would have imagined before.  He changed my opinion of him forever with this role, and for the first time I can look at Jim Carrey with unbiased eyes as a seriously talented actor with a range that can be aptly described as phenomenal.  But let’s not forget that Kate deserves her due for being half of this curious relationship.  Clementine is a free-spirit who doesn’t like being told what to do, doesn’t like boundaries, and it hurts her when Joel seeks to reign her in.  There are a number of scenes here in which she showcases an emotional range that solidifies her as one of the greatest actresses of this decade, and even with badly-dyed blue hair I can take a woman like her seriously.

But the peripheral characters also take us aback with their complex lives.  Lacuna Inc., the shady company that erases people’s memories, has an incredibly strange staff that somehow pull off the illusion that it’s a well-run, totally professional business, when in reality it’s the medical equivalent of hiring someone to steal all the photos in your wallet.  Headed up by Dr. Wierzniak and his assistant Mary, Lacuna uses some strange technology to do their dirty work, sending out slacker techies to make house calls and erase people’s memories from the comfort of their own home.  One of the technicians even tries dating Clementine by using the memories takes from Joel as he is erasing them!  Seedy, but it’s not nearly as bad as the relationship between the doctor and his assistant, which makes for some compelling drama.  The climactic scene between those two will have you aching for these characters, basking in their tragic realities.

So in the end, whether Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about the heart, the mind, or the soul, its expressive visuals and its candid storytelling weave an emotionally ecstatic film that will leave you fascinated and captivated.  It is an experience that you will want to hold onto in your memories for as long as you can.

366weirdmovies adds: Sunshine proposes a brilliantly simple “what if” scenario— “what if you could completely erase the memory of your ex-lover?”—that is a universal daydream of everyone who’s ever been on the “dumpee” side of a dumping. The movie gives an answer that rings emotionally true, and is at the same time shamelessly romantic, life-affirming, and melancholy. In a crucial way, it’s irrelevant whether Joel and Clementine get together and live happily ever after; the key triumph is when Joel decides he doesn’t want to forget, when he decides the temporary pain of their breakup shouldn’t be allowed to betray the beauty of their shared past, decides he’d prefer to stumble down the hard path to recovering from heartbreak than to take a shortcut that would wipe out something precious. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Synechdoche New York) is often accused of being overly intellectual, distant and tricky; this is his most emotionally authentic and sincere script, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s the one that’s fervently embraced by the widest audience. It’s an amazing and affecting movie, even if you’re not a fan of strange cinema.

As far as weird goes, I find it to be starter-level stuff, more speculative and offbeat than surreal. There is some delightfully resolved confusion resulting from playing around with the timeline, and Gondry’s set-pieces have a music-video type of oddness to them, but once the impossible premise is established the story plays out with a relentless narrative logic. Still, it’s within the weird genre, however tenuously, and it’s such a lovely and beloved movie that I’m afraid readers would hang me in effigy if I denied it it’s rightful place on the List of 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. It’s a great entry point into the deranged cinema of Kaufman and his bizarre cinema kin; starting from here, you can branch out into ever-weirder vistas.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the director always insists on an excess of surreality by pedantically realising visually every strange detail of Joel’s memory-angst… All very wacky and Dick Lester-ish, like a grad-school Beatles movie, and for about five or ten minutes it’s funny and exhilarating. But it’s over-extended, and tends to undermine the rigorous realism which made the idea funny.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

“Filled with the writer’s trademark neurotic characters, grungy atmospherics, and downbeat emphasis on domestic discord, it’s a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“In this season of abundance for amnesiac romances, Eternal Sunshine – with its laughs and its weirdness and its contemplation of some of the big issues regarding memory and identity – is the hands-down winner… a delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Focus Features – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

IMDB LINK: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Lacuna Inc. – the fake website for the memory-erasing corporation of Eternal Sunshine that was part of the original marketing campaign for the movie

Roger Ebert’s Great Movies Essay – In-depth meditation by Roger Ebert as to what makes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind such a classic.

The Science of Memory Loss – Slate.com chimes in with an intriguing essay about the realities behind the Eternal Sunshine ”memory erasure” technique.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at Being Charlie Kaufman – A fansite devoted to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Here you can find stills, fan art, audio, video, and even drafts of scripts from Eternal Sunshine.

Christian Review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – An… interesting take on the film from an interesting source!

DVD INFO: The original one-disc edition of this DVD (buy), which is incidentally the one I saw, isn’t incredibly flattering as far as the special features go, but I have seen much worse.  It comes with a Michel Gondry-Jim Carrey interview, which is playful but uneventful, some pretty good deleted and alternate scenes, a fake commercial for Lacuna Inc., and a terribly banal music video for a song The Polyphonic Spree lent to the film. The commentary is an acquired taste, but absolutely seminal if you like your commentary tracks. It’s performed by Kaufman and Gondry, and while it’s really quite informative, it sounds a bit like the David Lynch short The Cowboy and The Frenchman. Kaufman is very droll and American, Gondry is very giggly and French, so it makes for an interesting pairing in the recording booth when they’re both trying to relay their own experiences. Recently, a two-disc edition has emerged that blows the previous version out of the water (buy). It contains an “Anatomy of a Scene,” sit-downs with various cast members, some featurettes, and even a screenplay book! If you can, I would buy that edition, but for the filmgoer on a budget, the standard edition is more than adequate. Eternal Sunshine is also available on Blu-ray (buy) and as a rental on Amazon’s video on demand (rent).

DIRECTED BY:  Rian Johnson

FEATURING: Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi

PLOT:  Bloom is the passive brother floating in the wake of his older sibling Stephen, a

Dostoevsky among con-men, who devises one last elaborate grift to rip-off a pretty, rich and very eccentric widow.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Quirky, not weird.  For the weird fiend, watching a film like this is the equivalent of taking cinematic methadone while waiting to score some big-screen bizarre.

COMMENTS:  Though supposedly set in Montenegro, Prague, Mexico, St. Petersburg, and on a luxury steamer crossing the Atlantic, the real action in The Brothers Bloom is set firmly in Hollywoodland, a mythical, ultra-sophisticated realm where con men dress in pinstripe suits and bowlers to keep a low profile.  Our guides through this wish-fulfillment landscape of daring capers and champagne breakfasts are as quaint a collection of quirks as one might expect to bump into outside of a wine and cheese party held inside Wes Anderson’s noggin: Stephen, a master grifter who writes real-life dramas for his marks designed not only to make him money, but to keep them happy by fulfilling their need for romance and adventure; Bloom, a mopey soul who has lost his own identity through playing out Stephen’s scripts since childhood; Penelope, the socially backward heiress with a prodigal talent for absorbing other people’s skills, whether juggling chainsaws or making cameras out of watermelons; and Bang Bang, the nearly mute Japanese munitions expert, the screenplay’s most original invention and the one character who leaves us wanting more.  The cast does well, especially Brody as Bloom and a bubbly Weisz as Penelope (though however eccentric and awkward she might be, one has to seriously suspend disbelief to imagine that this pretty and very wealthy young thing isn’t swamped with suitors and hangers-on).

The con game is one of the toughest scripts to write, depending on its ability to surprise viewers who’ve seen many a twist ending in their day, and Johnson makes the task even tougher on himself by raising expectations and promoting his guys as the best in the business. In the end the final execution of the game doesn’t surprise, but the alert viewer has lots of fun along the way playing the multiple angles in his head, imagining possible double crosses as new players come into the field. The film runs out of gas before the end and sputters through a disappointing and overly sentimental epilogue/fourth act, but it doesn’t erase the enchantment built up until that point. A whiskey drinking camel and some interesting live action puns round out the fun.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘The Brothers Bloom’ is set on a planet somewhat like our own, but far wackier… The movie is wonderfully weird.”–Kurt Loder, MTV