The question is not why did they do it, but why didn't they do it sooner? After all, it seems like a perfect fit. The elastic comic star of Hollywood plays the lead role in a film by the resident genius screenwriter of un-Hollywood fare. Charlie Kaufman has created memorable roles which have drawn masterful, divergent performances from Cage and Cusack, so why not from Carrey?
"I get that question all the time," Jim Carrey said of putting his bombast on hold in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which opens tomorrow. "Just because it's kind of what you'd naturally think - that there's these two different worlds here going on at once, but there really isn't. It's just a different tone. So for me, the story's the star. And the idea is it."
The two worlds he speaks of are his "silly" films like "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and his "serious" films like "The Truman Show." Occasionally, he straddles the two, like he did with "Man on the Moon." But his performance as the forlorn Joel Barish in "Eternal Sunshine" is a tone in an entirely different key in an entirely different world.
It is a change of pace for all involved, as evidenced by the consensus of the cast, writer and director, all of whom gathered in the same board room at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills in Los Angeles for the ritual press junket. An unlikely bunch of artists, each wears the sign of some sort of professional maturation, evident both in person and in "Eternal Sunshine."
Kate Winslet plays Joel's erratic and imposing girlfriend, Clementine, who has her memories of him and their crumbling relationship erased through a fringe medical procedure. Winslet made a name for herself the same year Carrey did - 1994, when she was cast in Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures" and he in "The Mask." In subsequent years, the two stayed on their own beaten paths, often being brilliant, she in period dramas like "Sense and Sensibility," he in comedies like "Liar Liar."
In "Eternal Sunshine," which required Carrey to understate and Winslet to overstate, they got to try something new.
"I knew that I was walking into something that was a complete departure for me," Winslet said. "I am very used to really preparing for certainly the period pieces, because you have to know so much about where those people came from ... With this one, I tried to almost frighten myself a little bit. I hardly prepared at all."
"He doesn't have guile," Carrey said of his character. "He doesn't go into the world with a mask or a persona he carries."
The rest of the cast is rounded out by actors playing the staffers at Lacuna Inc., the medical practice that provides the memory erasure procedure: Tom Wilkinson as the pioneering doctor and leader, Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo as his bumbling assistants and Kirsten Dunst as his vapid secretary with a secret even she doesn't know.
All make an important step in their careers with "Eternal Sunshine." Ruffalo and Wilkinson received high critical praise for their breakout turns in "You Can Count on Me" and "In the Bedroom," respectively, but their comparatively smaller roles here might finally bring them the public recognition they deserve.
And Dunst and Wood seem to have completed the tricky transition between child movie star and mature movie star. Coincidentally, their breakthrough roles came in 1994 as well, with Dunst's role in "Interview with the Vampire" and Wood's in "The Adventures of Huck Finn."
"It's changed a lot for me what I do now and how I approach it and what I think about what I do," Dunst said of the transition. "And thankfully I still love what I do, but ... I made wrong decisions when I was younger for the wrong reasons. It's not something I would do with my child, but luckily, I just choose intuitively. It depends what I'm going through in my life - it mirrors what I choose."
"Yeah, same," Wood added. "I sort of just want to continue to be challenged, be a part of different films that have different perspectives. It sort of changes from one film to the next and one script to the next. It's hard to find a good script."
These days, one need not look farther than Kaufman for a good script. He penned the best movies of 1999 and 2002, "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," and "Eternal Sunshine," his fifth feature, is a story that delights itself once again in the way it is told. Joel and Clementine's relationship is illustrated through a series of memories, as each is erased by the folks at Lacuna. Originally intended to be a comedy, it came out as more of a bittersweet, yet whacky, romance.
"When I was writing it, I kind of realized it wasn't coming out as a comedy," the notoriously glib Kaufman said. "I didn't know going in that it wasn't."
Kaufman and director Michel Gondry worked together to make the film a seamless blend of visuals and narrative.
"Charlie and I talked a lot about how to use the visual to convey the idea of the loss of memory," said Gondry, a Frenchman whose bulk of directing experience is in music videos for Bjork, among others. "And we don't want to have an explosion of effect, a show-off of technology. But we thought that we should feel that physically the memories are vanishing ... I wanted Joel to feel threatened in this world that's decaying, so we had to find some tricks ... In this regard I could use some of the skills or techniques I found in my years doing videos."
There is plenty of visual trickery in the film, but most of it is accomplished the old-fashioned way. One scene takes place inside one of Joel's memories, and Carrey had to be in that scene twice, as his present self and as the self that is part of the memory. In order to be in two places at the same time, he had to run behind the camera as it moved around the memory, changing clothes and demeanor on the fly.
"I argued with [Gondry] a couple times about that I didn't think I could accomplish certain things," Carrey said. "I argued for 10 minutes and then we did it and the first time it actually came together, it was like old-time show business again ... For me, the special effect in this movie is the script. You don't need a whole lot of bells and whistles when you have a story that hits home."
"I think so much of what we ended up shooting was not only brilliantly written by Charlie, but within Michel's mind," Winslet said. "I personally just love that about this film, that whilst the story is told in this crazy, unorthodox way, it's actually a very simple love story about two people who are really meant to be together, in spite of this horrendous thing that they do."
"It's romantic and yet not romanticized," Carrey offered.
"Exactly," Winslet said.
"It's a real love," Carrey continued, "full of compromise and everything else love comes with, rather than a Romeo and Juliet kind of movie."
If this all sounds a little too deep for the college demographic, who might opt for something like "EuroTrip" instead, the cast cites additional appeal.
"Spider-Man's girlfriend," said Carrey, pointing at Dunst and inciting laughter in the room. "Dancing in her underwear."
"And the hobbit," Dunst adds, pointing at Wood, who claps along with everyone else.
"He could take his clothes off at any moment!" Carrey shouts.
Wood shakes his head, laughing. "And right there's the formula for success"
