Speak, Memory

Not wanting to curse Charlie Kaufman with too much praise, I'm tempted to say that his nonexistent twin Donald is the best American screenwriter since Preston Sturges. Donald won't let the comparison upset him. As you may recall from Adaptation, he is not the type to fret about living up to his reputation, or anything else; and besides, he's nonexistently dead, having been murdered in the last reel of his only film. Let Donald be the genius; or say that some random puppetmaster is responsible for what Kaufman writes, controlling him from within as in Being John Malkovich; or pretend that his scripts, though outwardly witty and inventive, are in fact damnable instruments of violence, like Chuck Barris's TV shows in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Better yet, wipe all praise for Kaufman from your memory, after the example of his unforgettable new film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Even Sturges couldn't have gotten away with that title. It's from Alexander Pope: "Eloisa to Abelard," a poem that previously worked its way into Being John Malkovich. In that Kaufman script, the puppetmaster performed Eloisa's story for a streetcorner audience, and got popped on the nose for his trouble. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman's character Clementine (Kate Winslet) aspires to the pristine oblivion that Eloisa desires; and like Eloisa--like Kaufman's character Joel (Jim Carrey)--she, too, gets popped on the nose (figuratively speaking), not by any outside force but by her own "loose soul unbounded." Pretty fancy stuff, for a sci-fi romantic comedy.

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