I wish that I could stop reviewing The Passion of the Christ.

Still, if anyone would understand our compulsion to return to the past in our search to understand the present, it would be ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND's screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation). His characters, especially leads Joel (Carrey) and Clementine (Winslet), keep drifting back to the same situations, even when they had scrubbed from their memories those thoughts and experiences which had first led them into their mutually destructive pas de deux. Romantics would call their unscripted drift back together fate, while materialists might chalk it up to the endurance of some determinants of attraction not rooted in memory. In the matter of psychic helplessness, as in the dynamics of memory, and the anomalies of love, Kaufman hits the nail on the head. Our inner narrative often has a center of gravity that we do not choose, and which we cannot change. For this movie-going season, for me, that center is The Passion, and even ETERNAL SUNSHINE, which is a far superior movie, I can only understand by contrast.

If one were to write one-sentence treatments of each film, they would show almost no similarity. The Passion tells the tale of a first-century Jew suffering excruciating torture and death at the hands of a mob for claiming to be the Messiah. In ETERNAL SUNSHINE, jilted lover Joel takes advantage of a new procedure by which he can wipe his memory clean of any traces of ex-girlfriend Clementine. Still, seeing these movies within a few weeks of each other, with little of note released in the interim, my impressions of the The Passion kept haunting my ETERNAL SUNSHINE experience.

ETERNAL SUNSHINE is, in its own way, as brutal as The Passion. Not very often do I so badly misjudge a movie by its promotional materials as I misjudged ETERNAL SUNSHINE. I expected something thoughtful, strange, and light. Instead, I got a film powerful, strange, and heavy, and here I must venture into the land of S-P-O-I-L-E-R-S. Most of the film is comprised of Joel trapped in his own mind, running from one dissolving memory of Clementine to another, desperate to abort the procedure, but powerless to do so. He loses her over and over and over again, as the doctor (Wilkinson) and technicians (Wood, Ruffalo) blot out the life and love they shared. The Clementine simulacra of his memory lose their faces, or get pulled away, or disappear as he turns his back for a second. Carrey suffers like a man whose lover has been abducted, but the same lover gets abducted a hundred times. I didn't cry during The Passion, but I did as Joel's last memory of a tryst with Clementine got erased, as the seaside house to which they fled fell apart and the sea rose up to wash her away forever. When that event had happened on their first meeting, he had ran away. Now, he exchanges last words with the woman he once knew:

Joel: I wish I'd stayed.
Clementine: What if you stay this time?

Such are our lives. Rarely do we lose what we love to the deliberate hatred of others. More often, time, decay, stagnation, resentment, and all the other slow poisons of existence rise up to blot out what had been our guiding stars. ETERNAL SUNSHINE encapsulates the most popular of our tragic fates. When Joel relives a memory of eating at Kang's Chinese Restaurant ("again!"), he frets "Are we one of those bored couples people see in restaurants Are we the dining dead?" I wonder how many movie-going couples saw some part of themselves in that remark, either then or at dinner after the show.

Making our way to the capital of the kingdom of the S-P-O-I-L-E-R-S, the E-N-D-I-N-G, we find Joel and Clementine assuming their crosses as willingly as did the Christ. Those who enjoyed The Passion drew inspiration from what I found to be shallow, i.e., Christ's almost unwavering acceptance of his fate. The Passion and ETERNAL SUNSHINE each are holding one of Nietzsche's hands, and the bridge between them is the adherence to the ideal of heroic resignation. When Nietzsche affirmed the freedom of humankind, he did so knowing full well that our power to choose is prefigured by the physical, emotional, and spiritual conditions of our origin. The totality of human freedom, he observed, could only be attained when one elected to chose those same unchosen limitations in which one had been thrust. The hero doesn't bemoan her fate, but embraces it, chooses it, and so escapes its domination.

A paradoxical ideal? Sure. But when Christ says that the howling mob can't kill him, that he lays down his life of his own accord, Gibson is clearly scratching the surface of Joshua ben-Joshua and finding some ubermensch underneath. Likewise, once memory-deprived Joel and Clem are alerted to their past relationship, and ratify it by choosing to restart a love they knew to be (somewhat) doomed, they exemplify the ideal of heroic resignation as it applies to romance. ETERNAL SUNSHINE captures it perfectly:

Clementine (protesting their starting up again): But you'll find things you don't like, and I'll get bored, because that's what I do.
*a beat passes*
Joel: Ok. (with enthusiasm) Ok!
*they laugh*
Both: OK!

Next we see them, they're running on the snow-covered beach in winter, playing, in love despite their knowledge of the better argument against it. And I think this is Charlie Kaufman at his most optimistic, embracing the idea that even the savagely self-critical might find some happiness if they were willing to walk bravely into certain harm.

Next Valentine's Day, there's room on the cross for one more.

-- Martin Scribbs

Read other Mixed Reviewers' reviews of ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND:
Jill's review
Gabriel's review
Ned's Review

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