McRomance! Want some fries with that shake? Spoilers!

Let make one thing perfectly clear: I don't hate surrealism. In fact, I'm quite fond of it; it can be very interesting. What I do hate is when people use surrealism in lieu of content, and that is what I think writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry did with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Think of this movie as a mash-up between Garden State and a reverse version of or Total Recall or Strange Days. The bare bones of the plot involve Joel (Jim Carrey) suffering a vicious break-up with his girlfriend of two years, Clementine (Kate Winslet). Clementine is, amongst other negatives, extremely impulsive, and immediately decides to undergo a procedure to erase all memories of Joel from her mind so that she can literally forget about him and move on. When Joel, still mourning the fresh loss, accidentally finds out what she's done, pain and revenge drive him to do the same. Most of the film takes place in Joel's mind during his mind-wipe, and as he relives some of the good memories of Clementine he decides that he doesn't want to lose them. Unfortunately, being heavily sedated and in the process of having his brain damaged (as Tom Wilkinson's doctor character admits in the film's best line), there's no way for him to communicate this. All he can do is cling to his memory Clementine, and try to hide her somewhere the mind-wipe can't go...

There are several interesting and mostly tragic issues in play here. The primary one is that Kate Winslet's physical beauty is the only thing remotely attractive about Clementine. She is thoroughly impulsive, narcissistic, addicted to "the moment", doesn't think before she speaks, an alcoholic, and probably some form of drug addict as, several times when we see her agitated, she complains that she feels like her skin's crawling off. With all the other negatives this girl's racked up, I'm inclined to not believe this is a figure of speech. Jim Carrey's Joel has his own issues - he's emotionally stunted when it comes to making human connections (not just love connections), uses sarcasm as his weapon of choice, and suffers from a long history of humiliation in various forms. In terms of character, he's fairly quiet and gentle, and likes to keep things simple and not rock the boat. All this to say that Joel and Clementine are completely incompatible - but Joel finds her exciting (at first), and what attracts Clementine to Joel is never really explained. Maybe she likes the attention, maybe she gets a thrill from getting boring people to be impulsive, maybe, as Joel accuses her in the fight that causes her to get her memory wiped, she really does just sleep with people to get them to like her. Because we are shown such potent negative aspects of their relationship, and the only cause we are given for them having lasted two years is that Joel found her exciting, it feels like a very weak basis for a story. When one of Joel's neighbours, noting that he hasn't made any Valentine's plans with Clementine yet, jokes that he'll wind up having to take her for fast food and having a "McRomance", he's not far off the mark.

After that biggie, I also felt the film got bogged down a lot by too much surrealism and not enough substance - at an average 108 running time, this film feels long. I suppose the point of having the technicians who do the actual mind wipe be completely irresponsible, unethical, stoners was to emphasize the inherent irresponsibility of having ones memory wiped in the first place, but their significant amount of screen-time made it irritating and overdone. But hey, it was pretty surreal, having stoned people wander around Joel's apartment eating his food and drinking all his booze while he was trapped in his mind!

Okay, I'm bashing the over-use of surrealism a lot here, so for the sake of fairness I should point out that as a film, it's probably the most skillful surrealism you'll ever see. Michel Gondry is known mostly for directing music videos for Bjork and Radiohead, and it shows. The visuals and editing are sheer genius and without fault. They're almost (for some people, absolutely) enough to make the film worth sitting through and even watching again. I have to wonder how much of the deep love and gushing feedback for this film has to do with the visuals.

Other pluses include Jim Carrey using his supreme control of his face and body for good and not evil. He dipped his toes in the dramatic pond with The Truman Show, proved himself a big fish with Man on the Moon, and he does not disappoint here.

But overall, for a script from a writer who expresses great interest in exploring the human psyche (Kaufman also penned Being John Malkovich and Adaptation), this story doesn't do a whole lot of exploring. This tale has a lot to do with the idea that people don't change. Joel and Clementine didn't succeed in changing each other while they were together, and, as evidenced by their immediate re-attraction, didn't change by forgetting each other either. Earlier in the film, we see someone else unaware of a prior memory wipe make the same mistake that led them to forget in the first place - in other words, a leopard doesn't change his spots. Which is an idea that pisses me off, because there is sufficient evidence in both secular and religious psychology (and everyday life) that people can change - a lot of them just refuse to. Asserting that they can't just isn't going to help anyone. But none of this really matters, because Kaufman never gets into the meat of these matters anyways - he makes a few direct statements and then lets the visuals do the talking, but the visuals are speaking a whole other language. It kind of winds up being an extreme perversion of the idea that love covers a multitude of sins. I can't help but compare Kaufman's work to Joel and Ethan Coen, whose scripts have universally dealt with the issue of whether or not people can or should change. Same essential theme of Eternal Sunshine, but name any Coen-written film and the theme will have been executed in a far more effective and interesting manner.

I think this movie is a mess of could've-beens and sloppiness. Plus, the fact that the woman being pined after is about as unappealing as a person can get makes me not care in the slightest about Joel's quest for her. A lot of people, like the very enthusiastic Blockbuster clerk who rang it up for me and any critic within 200 meters, love this movie, and a lot of them would probably say that I didn't get it. I suppose they'd be right.