Charlie Kaufman – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Self-consciously quirky. Inaccessibly weird and over-stylised. Auteristic. Take your pick. Arguably more distinctive, identifiable and downright accomplished than any other screenwriter of the past 10-15 years, Kaufman has given us Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Anomalisa and Synecdoche, New York. Those titles alone are more distinctive and resonant than those of any writer since Philip K. Dick (he of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) and have long since marked Kaufman out as a unique authorial voice.
With Adaptation, Kaufman decided to give his own battle with writer’s block the big screen treatment, whereas Synecdoche, New York’s play within a play within a film structure somehow managed to be breath-taking in its scope and themes rather than collapsing under the weight of its own ideas. Although there is a certain amount of high concept, capture the story in one sentence with Kaufman’s scripts, the detail and thoroughness of the execution is always so much more.
Whether it’s “a puppeteer discovers a portal into John Malkovich’s head”, or “A man decides to have his unhappy memories of an ex-girlfriend erased but then changes his mind”, or “a writer suffering writer’s block wrestles with a problematic adaptation while the story he is working on plays out on screen too”, what we are then given is so much richer than we think it could ever be.
Sometimes very clever stories can end up lacking heart and although our brains are exercised, we might admire but never really care about the film’s characters. Philip Seymour Hoffman is heart-breaking in Synecdoche, we cheer and root for Jim Carrey’s efforts to squirrel away memories in Eternal Sunshine and we ache with John Cusack’s final moment in Malkovich – trapped and helpless. For Kaufman to dodge the bullet of “all head, no heart” while still maintaining a distinctive personal style is commendable indeed.
