Year: 2004
Cast: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, David Cross, Jane Adams
Director: Michel Gondry
Nominations: Best Actress (Winslet), Best Original Screenplay
Now we come to a film that, unlike a lot of the films on my blog, isn't just more recent but also probably the most well-known.
Before I talk about the movie, and the nominated actress from it, I want to talk a little bit about its leading man, Jim Carrey.
There's a man who needs no introduction, at least to the current generation. For a while, he was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. As a comedian, he was considered by many, myself included, to be the heir to Robin Williams's throne. Some questioned whether he would have the staying power of Williams, or if he could do dramatic films with the same believability that Williams did, and Carrey himself responded with his mid-90's/early 00's film choices. Carrey desperately wanted to win an Oscar, and tried hard with two films in immediate succession: The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, the latter being a biopic of Andy Kaufman. He would go on to try a third time with the quickly-forgotten The Majestic, a movie meant to harkin back to the films of Frank Capra, with Carrey in the role that likely would have been filled by James Stewart, but Frank Darabont proved he was no Capra and Carrey was certainly no Stewart. There won't be another Stewart, so he shouldn't have tried.
This was his fourth attempt, and now I come to something that, as an adult, bothers me about Carrey. I refused to see this about him when I was younger, but now it's pretty obvious to me, and that is there is a certain "Carrey-ness" that he nearly always has with him, and it rubs people the wrong way. Robin Williams had a certain "Williams-ness" as well, but it worked in his favor whereas Carrey's worked against him. The best way I can describe it is that Williams always gave you the sense that he was a funny, sweet man, while Carrey gave you the sense that he was a funny jerk. This could be utterly wrong; Williams might very well have been a jerk (he was a double-divorcee and I think there were some less-than-savory rumors about him), and Carrey could be a great guy (this I'm near certain is wrong; numerous reports are that Carrey really is a jerk), and it doesn't matter what character they're playing or if it's comedy or drama; Williams was always likable (even at his least sufferable) while Carrey...isn't. Even when he's supposed to be. Think about his most popular comedy movies; Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber; seeing a pattern yet? Even as Truman Burbank he had his Carrey-moments, and as Kaufman he was trying to be unlikable, so...
If you really don't understand what I mean by "Carrey-ness", watch the trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog. Or don't because no one needs to suffer that way.
I watched a couple of his more recent movies; The Number 23 and Yes Man, and that's when I first understood the "Carrey-ness" problem, because both were movies in which he was trying to leave his rubber-face big goof persona behind, with The Number 23 being a straight drama we would expect to star someone like Kevin Bacon, while Yes Man was a comedy, but a more down-to-earth comedy like we usually get from Hugh Grant. In both of them, Carrey tried to be Bacon, or Grant, but in both of them, that Carrey-ness was still there, and you just didn't buy it. His serious performance seemed like Carrey mocking someone else's serious performance. He just couldn't turn off that Carrey-ness.
Well, if there's a movie where he turns it off with 100% success, it's this one. I totally believed him as sad-sack Joel Barrish, a man with nothing going on in his life and who personifies social anxiety and general awkwardness. You know that he was tempted to really play this up, acting the nebbish role with the same gusto as his other "weird" characters, with rapid eye twitches, sudden about-faces to avoid eye-contact, etc. But he doesn't do that. He feels familiar, like we've met this guy before, or even, perhaps more so, been this guy. As I understand it, we can thank director Michel Gondry for this in its entirety, because he was determined that Carrey be an everyman, and did things like ask him to hold on the hurt of a relationship of his that had just ended, allowing everyone to improvise except Carrey, giving him wrong orders or filming when he said he wasn't, not filming when he said he was, etc. Whatever all he did, it worked.
Joel essentially lives for his relationship with free-spirit Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) but the relationship between them isn't what it used to be, and after a big fight, in which he says something inexcusable to her, she storms out. The next time he tries to call, she's changed her number, and when he visits her at work, not only does she have a new boyfriend, Patrick (Elijah Wood), she behaves as if she doesn't recognize him. He learns that she's undergone an experimental procedure wherein she's wiped her memory of him, which hurts him to his core, and he decides he wants to do the same thing, so he won't have the pain of losing her. Midway through the procedure, when he's literally walking through memories of his time with her, he realizes he doesn't want to forget her after all, and tries to save the rapidly disappearing memories.
There's a lot more going on here, and a lot to explore. First, the whole idea of specific memory erasure could be a compelling film concept all on its own, but screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (along with Gondry and Pierre Bismuth) don't want to tell a sci-fi story. Their focus is on people, and we get a better movie for it. Second, a majority of this movie takes place from Joel's perspective as the erasure process is being performed, which is alternately, beautiful, creepy, wistful, sad, and angering. I love the ambiguity as to whether or not his recollections have anything to do with reality, and how we're never told because we only get his perspective. Third, the people doing the erasure easily could have been flat, undeveloped labcoat-wearing extras, but they're actually compelling enough that they could have starred in their own movie. The drama going on between the four of them (Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson and Elijah Wood) is enough to almost be its own story, with multiple secrets and breaches of ethics. That's all I'll say about it, and I'm afraid I've said too much already.
But the main focus of the film is on exploring Joel's and Clementine's relationship, retro-actively and in anachronic order; we see literally nothing in the order it happened and we have to kind of piece together what brought them together in the first place, what went wrong, whether or not what we're seeing is what really happened and whether or not the two of them should have ever been together.
There's a reason this film got a screenplay nod, too.
Clementine is a fascinating character in her own regard, mostly because we see three versions of her; the one in the real world, the one who purely exists in Joel's memories (almost a fourth character, as we see her when they were happy together and when they were about to break up), and a version he creates in his mind who's trying to help him remember. She's alternately fun and freaky, bitchy and supportive, and Winslet has to balance all of this and make each aspect true to the character, even as we get to see her both the way Joel likes to remember her and the way she really is. It's totally believable that they're the same woman. One crucial scene has her telling Joel right off that she's just a girl with her own problems and has no interest in being used by him as some sort of saving grace...and then Joel admits that's exactly what he tried to make her. Later, he says that unforgivable thing to her, and we wonder if he means it or if he's just angry and hurling an accusation, if he's right and she's in denial or if he's just a suspicious clingy jealous guy. We never really learn the answer and either is possible, but when he goes to have her erased from his mind, even though he's doing it to get over the pain, he starts repeating the same stuff that caused her to leave him, getting as vindictive as he thinks she's being.
I don't know that Carrey deserved to be nominated just for finally (this one time) turning off his Carrey-ness, but Winslet, an actress who's always watchable and always feels totally comfortable and natural, absolutely did, because this was a tough job and she pulled it off without even making it look hard. Just thinking about what it took to play three characters who are actually all the same character, and all are different but just similar enough to be believably the same person...ow, my head. Winslet is playing against type here, but to be honest, she's becoming such a chameleonic actress that I'm not sure she has a type anymore. She manages in this movie to steal scenes from Jim Carrey, who infamously upstages everybody in all his movies (on purpose), and is the most memorable part of what was supposed to be a Jim Carrey movie. She was supposed to be an added bonus and yet she's the real star of this.
So far, and admittedly that's only two down, Winslet is head and shoulders above her competition, but we'll see how the others do.
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