Hope Springs Eternal/ Maul Rats ('Eternal Sunshine,' 'Dawn of the Dead (04)')

Some people spend most of their lives inside their own heads, their reality a split-level home for things that don’t exist.  Furnished with recollections – some as comfortably worn as a favorite easy chair, some long relegated to attic storage – and menaced by fantasy and nightmare, it’s a world of what was and what might be.  Nothing is.  Current events are filed away for future reference or ignored completely.

Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) is one of these people.  His knit cap pulled tight over his skull, holding everything in, keeping everything out, he stands apart from what’s happening around him.  But he’s turned in on himself to such an extent that his value as an outsider has been lost.  His observations are boring.  “Sand is like little rocks.”  New memories and thoughts are as uninspired as box-store clearance items. 

Charlie Kaufman is one of these people, too.  The screenwriter behind ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’ he’s very used to spending some quality time indoors.  Every now and again he invites us in.  He punched tickets for his playful romp on identity, ‘Being John Malkovich;’ he metaphased and gave himself away in ‘Adaptation,’ a tactical maneuver about change.  Kaufman’s scripts are quite consciously about ideas.  Ideas are not what make movies; you cannot film an idea.

Luckily for Kaufman, he has had very able collaborators.  Director Spike Jonze brought ‘Malkovich’s’ dada a much needed matter-of-factness, and gave ‘Adaptation’s’ essay a game playfulness.  Here, he is partnered with Michel Gondry, the most inventive of today’s music video directors.  The man behind the White Stripes’ stop-motion miracles and many of Björk’s more fantastic efforts, Gondry specializes in surreal imagery and dizzying, five-minute Mobius-strip stories.  It is an inspired pairing for a film that could easily have turned into nothing more than a series of flashbacks. 

Luckily for Joel, he had Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet).  Clem is a creature of now, given to whims and primary-colored hair.  Because of her, these opposites attract as fiercely as possible.  She pulls Joel out of his head, and gives him some interesting things to take back with him when he inevitably retreats. 

She has already come and gone by the time the movie begins, and Kaufman’s script starts casually Philip Dicking around.  Joel learns that the typically impulsive Clementine has gone to extreme lengths to get over him:  She’s had him erased from her memory.  Overwhelmed and hurt and very used to feeling nothing at all, Joel desperately follows suit.  Most of the feature is spent inside his head, reliving their relationship for the last time as technicians surgically strike the whole thing away.

For such a radical procedural, the film’s core is nothing new.  “Be careful what you wish for” is a lesson as antiquated as oil lamps, and wild child-repressed guy pairings are old muse.  The structure – we mostly move backwards through Joel and Clem’s coupling – could be seen as lifted from Pinter’s ‘Betrayal.’ Even ’21 Grams,’ just a couple months ago, hari-kari’d itself to make a point that every moment counts.

But Gondry and Winslet make this special.  The director has invested himself emotionally in the film, and the care he’s taken brings the story a sweetness it might otherwise not have had.  Though its love story is more created than observed – details are lost more than found – that doesn’t make the love less real. 

Winslet’s Clementine – or really Winslet’s Joel’s Clementine, as we rarely experience her outside of his head – is such a strong character that, not only does her erasure seem a palpable loss, it feels completely plausible when she decides to commandeer the plot into less likely areas of Joel’s brain.  (Though the second half of the picture recalls ‘Malkovich’s’ bravura chase through that star’s subconscious, the conceit is fresh enough that it survives the expansion.)  Ultimately, her presence is so genuine that we’ll accept the movie’s insistence that it is better to love and lose, again and again.

Carrey, thankfully, turns in an antic-free performance.  For the most part, he stays out of the way of the material; when called upon to do so, he summons up a sadness that only comic actors can. 

Just about everything that takes place outside of Joel’s head doesn’t work, as if to explain why he withdrew in the first place.  Various plots involving the team of scientists performing the operation (Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood) range from half-formed to wholly annoying.  And the structure of the film, already nonlinear, didn’t need the added confusion of starting in the middle.

To get hung up on whats and whys and could’ve/should’ve beens, though, is to miss the point entirely.  We are made of memories, but need new ones to grow.  It is springtime.  Open up the house and let the sunshine in.

“Look, I can go backwards!”

So brags a roller-skating tot to a neighbor, early on in the remake of George A. Romero’s 1978 classic ‘Dawn of the Dead.’  It could also be the misguided boast of an entire generation of genre filmmakers.

The Romero film was a gargantuan epic of independent filmmaking.  Opportunistically shot in a soon-to-open shopping mall outside Pittsburgh, its intelligent script and sawed-off shotgun execution transcended budget and genre, mixing suspenseful action-horror with biting social satire, horrific unrated gore with slapstick. 

Zack Snyder’s remake keeps the central concept:  The reanimated dead are roaming the earth, attacking the living; a group of desperate humans barricade themselves inside a shopping mall.  But this is a zombie film in more than one respect.  The higher brain functions are gone.  As are a lot of the guts.

This is no surprise.  That’s what remakes can do, show movies how far they’ve come or how far they’ve fallen.  When Snyder’s flick starts to regurgitate one of Romero’s more famous bits of dialogue, about why the zombies are congregating around a shopping mall of all places... it stops short.  “They’re after the place,” the film leaves out, embarrassed.  “This was an important place in their lives.”

Why harp on what the original was, and what this version is not?  Because this new one  simply isn’t enough.  This is the ‘Dawn’ we deserve, now:  A serviceable popcorn flick.  Its zombies are of the ’28 Days Later’ variety –  faster, emptier, and R-rated (ixnay on the real violence until Universal can sell you an unrated Director’s Cut DVD).  The speed is more ADD than accelerated culture.  They’re “Boo!” monsters, no reflection of us; there’s no time for reflection, here.  And there are more humans in the mall, this time:  All the better to load up on the attractive women, and to avoid character development.

The embodiment of the movie is its main hero:  Jake Weber’s Michael is a bland underachiever.  He’s never been able to hold on to a job, or a woman.  He seems to have found his calling playing the leader of “Survivor: Mall,” but still doesn’t get that much screen time.  And that’s the film:  Aimless, undermotivated, forgettable.

No denying there are some good moments.  There’s a moving long-distance relationship with a stranded gun shop owner.  There are a few laughs, including some literal potshots at celebrity culture.  And the closing credits have a video-bred urgency that the rest of the film lacks. 

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(The Work of Director Michel Gondry was recently released on DVD by Palm Pictures, and is highly recommended.  The original 1978 version of Dawn of the Dead has just been released on DVD by Anchor Bay; a Special Edition of the same is due later this year.)

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