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Last night, as David inevitably fell asleep on my shoulder during the opening previews, I sat and watched a movie that was so excellently done it will probably make my favorite “top ten”, if such a list was actually compiled. It’s been on my Netflix queue seemingly forever; I’ve wanted to see it since it first came out and have no idea why I put it off so long, but that a more perfect story for where I “was” yesterday couldn’t have been chosen.

I love it when I’m just going along through life and then, WHAM! A work of quality hits me over the head. An artistic work beautifully done with a coherant plot and point, but not in-your-face. Rather with a touch of nuance and subtley that is quietly profound.

There’s plenty to distract if one refuses to quiet themselves and just recieve the message. The protagonist is Jim Carrey and with him, the temptation is to wonder how the same man can do The Mask and still pull of a serious film. His love is Kate Winslet with three colors of hair at different points in the movie (and it’s orange, green, and blue not brown, blond, and red). It proves to be a valuable distiction because as with most “Focus” films I’ve seen, the time sequence can hop around. The hair color of Clementine helps provide context! If one is F-word sensitive, it shows up a few times. But if one can look past the outward into these character’s eyes, and hear the story, it’s well worth the time spent.
I love that this story, this work, was anti-formulatic. To do it in a straight-forward Hollywood way would have been insulting to the integrity of the story. The Focus Film house usually treats it’s audience with quite a bit of respect, pays attention to detail like the little inanimiate objects around us and how they effect us, how we use them for bookmarks in our minds. Our memories hop all around sometimes and it was neat to see a movie capture that effectifively. It was layered and like I said, profound. It reached the human core, that longing place where we want the pain that comes from intimacy to go away and it follows through the supposition of what that could result in should we get the chance to try.

The movie is The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The title comes from a poem by Alexander Pope called Eloisa to Abelard and is a (long) tale of intense love, tragedy, separation, and extreme grief. In the midst of his torment he contemplates the naivete of an easy life:

“  How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
“Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;”
Desires compos’d, affections ever ev’n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav’n.”

And yet, the reality of his love is not like that and even with the pain and imperfection of the lot he’s been given, he longs for them to be together in spite of it all. The film honestly communicates that lump-in-the-throat vulnerablity of knowing that even though life is messy we prefer it to not loving at all. That inter-personal connection of really being “known” by another, faults and all, is craved at our deepest core. Through the film, we are reminded that our wounded selves may recoil at pain and may want to wash it all away, but in doing so the good and wonderful, the happiness and joy goes along with it. To remove it in all, or even in part, is not an honest memory.

“  From the full choir when loud Hosannas rise,
And swell the pomp of dreadful sacrifice,
Amid that scene if some relenting eye
Glance on the stone where our cold relics lie,
Devotion’s self shall steal a thought from Heav’n,
One human tear shall drop and be forgiv’n.
And sure, if fate some future bard shall join
In sad similitude of griefs to mine,
Condemn’d whole years in absence to deplore,
And image charms he must behold no more;
Such if there be, who loves so long, so well;
Let him our sad, our tender story tell;
The well-sung woes will soothe my pensive ghost;
He best can paint ‘em, who shall feel ‘em most.”

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