LEON (1994), dir. Luc Besson

Bullets will Fly; Hearts will Swoon

Luc Besson is known for having style to burn, and in his 1994 action-drama "Leon," some of his storytelling choices leave an indelible impression, even when they defy conventional logic.

In the opening sequence, a professional hitman leads a one-man assault on a gang of heavily-armed drug dealers holed up in a New York City penthouse. At one point, the main heavy gets separated from his bodyguards by a storm curtain, which falls across a balcony door. Despite blasting enough holes in the barrier to make it resemble swiss cheese, the assassin manages to survive. We can see his eye peer in through one of the bullet holes in the curtain.

The heavy panics, runs down a nearby corridor to grab his cell phone. His back to the shadows, he does not see the hitman reappear behind him until the knife is at his throat. Considering that the assassin was last seen outside what should have been an impenetrable fortress of an apartment, it seems impossible that, in the span of mere seconds, he is now on the inside. But that’s okay, because the hired killer, with his black coat, mustache and beard, tinted shades and cool demeanor, looks awesome. He is Leon, and given the worldwide popularity of the movie which bears his namesake, he might be the paradigm of what the coolest hitman on the planet would look like.

But Besson fools us with his opening salvo of stylish sound and fury into thinking "Leon" is just another action movie. Instead, the pyrotechnics punctuate an unexpectedly touching drama about the relationship between a young girl, played by Natalie Portman, and Jean Reno’s angel of death, whose life she falls into. Her arrival is preceded by the murder of her entire family by Stansfield (Gary Oldman), a volatile, pill-popping DEA agent who leads a squad of drug-pushing cops. The angel of death becomes an angel of mercy, too. He teaches the waif Mathilda the art of "cleaning" (a euphemism for killing), but also shows her kindness and affection, which she has been missing all her life.

Initially, Leon agrees to shelter and train Mathilda out of a sense of responsibility. However, when Mathilda learns that teacher cannot read, the young charge begins to offer more than just apartment-cleaning services. Ultimately, they become partnered as assassins as well. Though always enamored with the tall, aloof figure of Leon, Mathilda gradually falls in love with him. This causes Leon no small amount of discomfort, given their age difference. While their relationship never becomes sexual, it would be fair to classify "Leon" a romance. Leon and Mathilda share many quiet, happy moments that wouldn’t seem out of place in a more adult drama.

There is a risk inherent to any story where an ingenue bonds with a much older man. Ever since Nabokov’s Lolita, the mere suggestion of such a relationship conjures up unwholesome images of middle-aged men preying on sexually-curious young girls. But the creep factor never comes into play in "Leon." Credit goes to Besson’s screenplay, which cleverly inverts the expected formula. Now Mathilda plays the worldly pursuer, while Leon is the inexperienced love object.

Throughout the training of his new charge, Leon does not suspect that his manner of interacting with Mathilda, which he construes as teacher/student, is interpreted by her as romantic interest. Observe the scene where he waits inside his "contractor’s" restaurant. Through the glass door, Leon sees a strange-looking young man trying to chat Mathilda up. He intervenes, gives Mathilda the obligatory warning about taking cigarettes from strangers. But after he goes back into the restaurant, she looks happier than we have ever seen her. She interprets, perhaps rightfully, that Leon’s behavior reflects jealousy, fear that another man could steal her away. Now she knows his heart belongs to her, and the knowledge leaves her practically breathless.

Jean Reno’s cool hitman speaks through action, not words. After Mathilda goes back to her slain family’s apartment, and digs up $20,000 in cash her father kept hidden in the floorboards, she offers it to Leon in exchange for hits on Stansfield and his men. But drug dealers are one thing; cops make for complicated targets. That, we reason, is why Leon turns Mathilda down. Not until the end do we infer another possibility: Leon knows that, if he takes out the men who killed Mathilda’s family, she will have no reason to continue staying with him. After all, what is the purpose of continuing to train for revenge, if the objects of one’s hatred have been wiped off the face of the Earth?

But love means letting the object of our affection go free, and it is only a matter of time before Leon realizes how much he loves Mathilda. He chooses to sacrifice himself for that love, to risk bringing the cops down upon his head, and to risk her leaving him. In deciding his fate, Leon becomes a man. He insinuates as much to Mathilda, when she asks him why he is going on this particular mission without her.

"I need to do some growing up," he says.

Why are complicated emotions, such as love, so difficult for Leon to come to grips with? Perhaps the secret lies in his way of life. "When you kill someone," he warns Mathilda, "nothing is ever the same." Not true. Leon’s daily existence is always the same. He trains all morning, never leaves the city, sleeps with one eye open. Until Mathilda arrived on his doorstep, nobody had a chance to get close. Mathilda, on the contrary, manages to keep blood off her hands to the end. That allows her to walk away from a life of violence, death, and "cleaning."

"Leon" is a classic; the action set pieces are at the service of a careful study of two most sympathetic characters.

Overall rating: **** (out of ****)

THE WARRIORS (1979), dir. Walter Hill

A Long Night’s Journey into Day

The armies of the night are over 60,000 strong, composed of hard-core "boppers," as well as factions who aren’t yet recognized. On this particular evening, every gang is sending a delegation of nine to the Bronx. They’re going there because Cyrus, the leader of the largest gang in the city, the Gramercy Riffs, is planning to speak. If you’re any kind of "bopper" in New York City, when Cyrus calls a meeting, you show up.

A month ago, Cyrus called for a truce between the gangs. No more fighting over scraps of turf, no more "wasting" each other. The truce is still on, and so, on a night where arguably the most powerful man in the city will deliver an address, thousands of angry, violent young men will go to the Bronx unarmed. No knives, no clubs. Any respectable "bopper" would not dare break the truce.

In a public square packed to the gills with athletic young men outfitted in their respective "colors," Cyrus calls for all the gangs in the city to unite. "We outnumber the cops three-to-one," he says. If only they would stop wasting one another, and marshall their forces into a single, giant army, the gangs could conquer the city one borough at a time.

Instead of the constant inter-gang "bopping" that has permeated gang culture forever, Cyrus argues for a more professional code of behavior. He envisions a new gang culture similar to the military: an umbrella land force broken up into smaller branches, each branch composed of even smaller units. In his speech, Cyrus goes as far as referring to the assembled "boppers" as "soldiers;" they have the potential to become Alexander the Great’s army, with Cyrus himself as the titular general.

In "The Warriors," the key to success is a professional code of behavior, and David Shaber and Walter Hill, co-writers of Hill’s 1979 film, up the ante further. Following a professional code of behavior becomes necessary for survival, not just thriving, after a small Coney Island gang, fittingly called the Rogues, disobeys the truce, and sneaks in a pistol (passed hand-to-hand, in a beautifully-edited montage), which they use to kill the Gramercy Riffs’ leader.

Chaos breaks loose, as police arrive and "boppers" scramble. The Rogues manage to pin the killing on a rival gang from Coney called the Warriors, who are initially unaware of the frame-up. After wriggling free of the cops’ grasp, the Warriors concern themselves with getting back to their home turf. This will not be simple, since their leader, Cleon (Dorsey Wright), has been arrested, and the rest of the gang are unarmed, in the midst of enemy territory.

"The Warriors" is fast-paced, action-packed, and depicts gang life about as authentically as "West Side Story" (To their credit, the Warriors sing and dance less). But I get the feeling this movie aspires less to be "Colors" or "Menace II Society," and more a high-energy, urban fantasy. At its worst, "The Warriors" romanticizes gang culture the way "The Godfather" gussied up the mafia, the title gang itself more like the A-Team than a pack of common hoodlums. Their members throw knives with pinpoint accuracy, deliver karate moves that would make Bruce Lee nod in admiration, and refrain from committing robberies or shakedowns (though there is one attempted rape).

A better comparision for "The Warriors" might be a military movie. Trapped deep behind enemy lines, this unit of eight must somehow sneak back across the border to safety. Instead of German tank patrols, the Warriors have to evade trucks packed with the Turnbull A.C. gang. This is where the importance of professional conduct comes in. After Cleon goes down, the gang initially gets mired by in-fighting, as war chief Swan (Michael Beck) clashes with their best fighter, Ajax, over leadership. But roles have to be determined, and more importantly, agreed upon, if the Warriors have any hope of surviving the night.

When everyone is on the same page, the gang is invincible. They take positions, then dispatch of a lightweight gang called the Orphans, without having to exchange a word. Against a clown-faced ambush, the Warriors split up, then double back on their unsuspecting enemies, assaulting them on two fronts. Unity is especially vital, since the Riffs, the Turnbull A.C.’s, the Lizzies, and other factions have joined forces to kill them. The part of the movie I found most fascinating was how the pursuers use a radio station DJ to keep everyone informed on the status of the hunt. Over the airwaves, she mentions the location of the quarry, who got wasted trying to do them in. The filmmakers’ most devilish moments of humor come when the DJ plays songs specifically for the Warriors to hear, including such aptly-named 70’s hits as "Nowhere to Run."

The Warriors’ journey from the Bronx to Coney Island leads to tangles with cops, blood enemies, even a pack of attractive females who resemble the sirens who side-tracked Odysseus. But the gang endures, not only because they fight well together, but because they look out for one another, as professional soldiers are wont to do. They leave no man behind, and if it does happen, they lament.

The movie’s director is Walter Hill, a Hollywood veteran whose last picture, 2002’s "Undisputed," starred Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames as prison boxers. Hill seems to have a knack for male characters who live dangerously, and have trouble showing their sensitive sides to their women. Think of the relationship between Nick Nolte and Annette O’Toole in "48 Hours"; Jeff Bridges and Ellen Barkin in "Wild Bill"; James Spader and Angela Bassett in "Supernova."

Romance waits to bloom between the Warriors’ de-facto leader, Swan, and Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburg), the girlfriend of the Orphans’ chief. But every time she tries to get close, he pushes her away. By the film’s end, she has shown herself to be as tough as any Warrior, and he articulates his feelings through a gesture that is quiet, but satisfying for the audience.

"The Warriors" is well-made, disposable entertainment. It has arguably two flaws, the first being the lack of real depth in many of the characters. There are few standouts, and one of them, Cleon, vanishes early from the movie. We remember Swan, because he is the leader of the gang, and because he gets several scenes alone with Mercy. Mercy stands out the strongest for me, not only because she has the largest role of any female character, she also changes the most between her first appearance and the movie’s end. When she first appears beside the Orphans, she has a hard, tough-gal quality. But check out the scene in the subway, where she is sitting next to Swan, and two prom night couples walk in. The prom dates are about the same age as her. They have coiffed hair, nice dresses, corsages, pretty shoes. At first, they barely notice Mercy, but when they do, they cannot stop staring at her.

The camera, representing their point of view, pans down from her dirty hands, past her sooty pink dress, down to her blackened feet and shoes. Tough girl Mercy instantly becomes self-conscious. She ducks her head in shame and closes her eyes, as if wishing for invisibility. It’s an unexpected moment, a powerful 180-degree turn, and our opinion of her, which may not have been favorable up until now, instantly changes into sympathy.

The other Warrior we remember is Ajax, who attempts to rape a woman sitting alone in a park. He’s a brute from the start, a veritable fistful of macho bluster every time he opens his mouth. But James Remar plays him as a deceptively complex musclehead, loyal to the death, just as quick to accuse his fellow boppers of being "fags," before storming off to beat or molest somebody. Of the entire cast, Remar had the best career after "The Warriors," and after watching his fearless performance, it’s easy to see why.

My final qualm with the movie are the "colors" the various gangs wear. So much creativity goes into their costumes that, by the time the guys in Yankee pinstripes and clown make-up show up, things start to get ridiculous. Along with the Warriors, who are decked out as Indians, we have the Riffs, who wear matching orange karate uniforms, the Rogues, who don black leather jackets, the aforesaid Baseball Furies, the Turnbull A.C.’s, who look like dock workers, the High Hats, who wear black top hats, and guys on roller skates with horizonally-striped sweaters. Granted, gang culture prior to the days of minimalist gangsta rap is alien to me, but I still find it hard to believe that genuine hard-core "boppers" wore attire like that during the 1970’s.

And maybe that’s the point. Remember, if viewers back then had accepted "The Warriors" as a sociological artifact, reflecting the actual status of gangs in New York City during the 70’s, that would mean gang members really outnumbered cops 3-to-1. That would have scared a lot of people, no matter how absurdly-dressed those 60,000 soldiers of the night were.

Overall rating: *** (out of ****)

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), dir. John Carpenter

He's in a New York State of Mines

The year is 1997. Crime has increased 400% in the United States. As a result, New York City has been transformed into a maximum security prison. Bridges and tunnels, which once connected the city to the outside world, have been mined. A fifty-foot high wall has been erected on all sides of the island, and Hudson Bay is routinely patrolled by the United States Security Force. New York City is no longer for tourists. It now exists to house the nation’s most dangerous criminals, those for whom the jailhouse key has been tossed away with impunity. There is no hope for parole from New York. The United States Security Force will not hesitate to kill prisoners who try to escape. The official motto of this future prison is, "You go in, you don’t come out."

Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell) attempted to rob the U.S. Treasury, and is about to be exiled into this urban hellhole. Plisskin sports an eyepatch, a tattoo from which, we guess, he acquired his surname, and a glottal-based growl that sounds like Clint Eastwood on a really bad day. But Snake is also former Special Forces. He can fly a plane and wield a machine gun. This will come in handy for him, because Air Force One has just crash-landed in New York City, and the President, who escaped in a small orange pod, is now trapped in the labyrinthean prison of his own making. Somebody has to go in and rescue the poor bureaucrat. If Snake can do it, within 24 hours, he gets a full pardon.

Of course, Hauk (Lee Van Cleef), the man in charge, isn’t about to entrust the fate of America to a convicted criminal. He has Snake implanted with two small explosives that will kill him if he doesn’t come back with the President before the one-day deadline expires.

Therein lies the plot of "Escape from New York," John Carpenter’s low-budget, but extremely fun, 1981 action movie. As Carpenter himself admits, the film is basically a western, with some sci-fi stuff tossed in. New York City could easily be a small town called Dry Gulch. Snake is the stranger who walks in on a mission, and soon finds himself in conflict with forces that may not uphold the law, but certainly make the rules. Most of the movie is composed of shots with characters in the foreground, which constantly draw attention to the debris-laden streets and burned-out building interiors behind them. The bare-bones nature of the backgrounds conjure up the feel of old Western sets, which often seemed stripped down to the basics. Keep an eye out for the scraps of paper which periodically blow through the unpeopled streets like tumbleweed. It’s a relatively minor detail, but one of Carpenter’s most effective ones.

Also remniscent of the Western: Bad guys that squint into the camera as if staring into the sun (And despite the fact that most of the movie takes place at night). Hard-as-nails women who are a match for any man. Lest we think that John Carpenter isn’t in on the joke himself, he dresses up many of the inmates in cowboy hats and boots, and even stages a pitched gunfight atop the World Trade Center between Snake, his tentative buddies, and some, well, Indians.

Given the director’s budget constraints, the scope of New York City, prison of the future, is actually quite impressive. As legend tells it, Carpenter couldn’t afford to film large portions of the movie in the real Manhattan. However, while he was trying to figure out what to do, a major fire ripped through St. Louis, devastating entire blocks, but creating a usable wasteland. The cast and crew relocated, and did most of their work at night. St. Louis stands in for New York quite admirably. Some of the architecture, particularly in the library where the character Brain is holed up, reminded me of its northeastern counterpart. It really looks like something beautiful that has been left to slowly decay over many years.

"Escape from New York" was a big hit when it arrived in theaters. This seems somewhat surprising, given that Carpenter first wrote the screenplay shortly after Nixon’s impeachment. It languished many years, until America’s urban centers started becoming more dangerous. Then Reagan took office, and studios felt the country needed a movie where a gun-toting psychopath blows away dangerous street scum. Carpenter enlisted an ex-USC buddy named Nick Castle as co-screenwriter. Castle’s contribution can be seen in the many "New Yawk" in-jokes, such as Ernest Borgnine’s crazy cabbie, and the bizarre all-prisoner revue Snake stumbles upon on Broadway (In another scene, Snake is set upon by cannibals in a diner called "Chock Full ‘o Nuts." I don’t know whether Nick Castle wrote that, or if it’s even New Yawk humor, but it’s evidence that Carpenter’s films are compulsively rewatchable).

Castle’s contributions aside, the final screenplay for "Escape from New York" still features the distrust of authority, and the portrayal of an inept military, which peppered John Carpenter’s original draft. The very first scene of the film, two prisoners are paddling for the wall in a small raft that looks made out of cardboard. A U.S.S.F. helicopter uses a missle to kill them. The dispatching of the attempted escapees is so extreme that it becomes satirical.

And then there is the President (Donald Pleasance, who appeared in Carpenter’s "Halloween"), not exactly a great man whom Snake is trying to save from thousands of rotten apples. While the audience does not get much info on the world situation in 1997, nor what is on the mysterious tape the President was carrying around in his briefcase, the movie tell us this much: The United States, China, and Russia are all at war. The contents of the tape, which must be delivered to a summit meeting between the three countries, have something to do with nuclear fusion.

Is the U.S. at war with both China and Russia? Are we all at war with each other? Does nuclear fusion have something to do with building better atomic bombs? Is this information meant to intimidate the other two countries? The President, in a makeshift satellite address, says that the tape’s contents are meant to convince the entire world to live in peace with one another. But what kind of "peaceful world" can this President be entrusted to create? The kind that features a worldwide police state, not just nationwide?

Snake Plisskin never comes across as a man deserving clemency. By the film’s end, however, he is a man who has spent 24 hours in Hell. He has seen his fellow beings living in dehumanized conditions. Having rescued the President, he only wants the leader of the free world to acknowledge his humanity, and the humanity of everyone who died saving his behind. He wants to be called Plisskin, not "Snake" (Was "Snake" an institutional name, acquired from either the military or jail…?).

With the President remaining mum on the issue, Plisskin’s final act of sabotage can be viewed as a call for anarchy. But "Escape from New York" is, as Carpenter himself described, a western. Plisskin is a futuristic cowboy, and what he really argues for is man’s right to self-respect, and to exist. The tape bit is a small gesture, the most that can be done by a solitary being in a great, cold world. But the same could be said of John Carpenter with this film, and given "Escape from New York’s" enduring popularity, no one can question the lasting ripples any heartfelt effort can leave.

GALLIPOLI (1981), dir. Peter Weir

Casualties of Weir

Going in to "Gallipoli," Peter Weir’s 1981 war movie, I was expecting something along the lines of the director’s 2003 masterpiece "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." The latter work featured beautiful cinematography, and battle scenes on an epic scale. But it also had, at its center, two well-defined and interesting characters in Russell Crowe’s Captain Jack Aubrey, and Paul Bettany’s ship doctor.

It is interesting to see the ways in which "Gallipoli" is similar, and how it is different. Once again, the movie revolves around two characters who are in the same business, but aren’t much alike. Since the movie is a historical drama, and must eventually take its protagonists to the titular campaign, we can accurately guess that both men are soldiers. But Archy Hamilton (Mark Lee) and Frank Dunne (Mel Gibson) are also two of Australia’s best sprinters. The first third of the movie follows them as they prepare for a major race, where Archy barely defeats Frank. The rest of the film details their experiences at a not-so-well-known World War I campaign, where the Australians got to be cannon fodder so the more important British army could successfully invade Istanbul.

Archy and Frank emerge as not-so-friendly rivals following Archy’s win at the race. The former is from a well-to-do family of horse ranchers. He has a world-class sprinter for an uncle and coach, and races for pride and athletic glory. Frank, on the other hand, labors for a railway company. Prize money is his only objective. Weir and his screenwriter, David Williamson, define the primary motivations of the characters early on, and we get to see how their approach to racing translates, predictably, to their approach to going to war.

We already know that Archy is an idealist. He sees his own and Frank’s athletic prowess as inarguable reasons for why they must go and fight. With great power comes great responsibility, seems to be his rationale. Ever the more practical one, Frank sees the light infantry as a chance to attain military glory without having to engage in too much direct combat. Archy is too young to be accepted into the army. He needs Frank’s street smarts to help him sneak in, while Frank needs Archy to teach him how to ride a horse.

Like "Master and Commander," "Gallipoli" is a character-driven war epic. However, Frank is the only one whose head we really get into. Archy is likable enough, with his angelic good looks and kind disposition. But being younger than Frank, he comes across as somewhat bland. Weir might have intended this, however. By depriving Archy of personality, and casting an actor with saintly good looks to play him, Archy becomes more of a martyr than a character. He represents all the young Australian men who went to war with idealistic outlooks. What is even more powerful, Archy has tremendous talent. His own uncle, timing him during a morning run, can barely withhold his astonishment at the potential his nephew shows.

When tragedy befalls Archy, his great potential becomes lost. The way Weir frames the incident, however, is as symbolic as the way Oliver Stone portrays Elias’ "dance of death" in "Platoon." The fall of one young man becomes the fall of countless young men. The loss of a single life, just entering its blooming stage, becomes a generation lost before it has the chance to reproduce itself.

And yet, "Gallipoli," somber towards the end, is not all about the tragedy of war. In Frank, we get redemption, a character who begins his journey as a pragmatist, a coward, and if the movie had a longer running time, most likely he would have become a war profiteer. But Frank’s experiences at the front change him. By the end of the film, he finds tremendous courage within himself. He becomes willing to die for his fellow soldiers; heroic, if not a hero.

The story of "Gallipoli" is that of nature and rustic beauty constantly intruded upon by chaos and death. Weir smashes the two polarities together, yielding some very startling images. There is the outdoor race during the first half of the film, a country fair whose tranquility comes to a close by the appearance of a large, wooden horse—the Australian army’s recruiting tool. Whether the Australian military actually used a giant wooden horse for marketing purposes in 1915, the symbolism of the man-made animal does seem fitting.

Then there is the underwater scene. Archy, Frank, and a bunch of soldiers are cavorting in the sea, when bullets ring out. Everyone dives under the surface, and we get these extremely graceful shots of human bodies playing on the ocean floor. At one point, Frank picks up a gun lying on the reef, and pretends to return fire at the Turks. He grins at Archy; Archy grins back. They can hear the bullets penetrate the surface of the water overhead, but neither they, nor any of their mates beside them, seem to think that they are in any danger. Then one of the soldiers takes a bullet in the arm—a lucky Turk shot—and he bobs to the surface bleeding and shouting in pain. The scene does not turn immediately serious. But one gets the feeling, even as Frank grins after the wounded soldier, that the fun is over.

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004), dir. Michel Gondry

IT’S GONNA BE A SAD, DRAB, BUT TRUTH-LADEN, "SUNSHINE-Y" DAY.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004) easily ranks with "The Truman Show" as Jim Carrey's best movie. Heck, this might even place above that one. After all, the actor that portrayed Truman Burbank merely had to be likable. The strange, behind-the-scenes happenings and reality TV conspiracies were more than compelling enough to carry the film.

Chris Rock was right. Anybody could have starred in "The Truman Show." The question is, could just about anyone have played Joel Barish? Shy, sensitive, curmudgeonly, goofy-looking, tight-mouthed Joel Barish? Call me crazy, but I don’t think so. I’ve always felt that Jim Carrey’s performances in his earliest, most popular comedies, had this sort of desperate edge. Here was a man willing to stoop to any lengths to get a rise out of you. Problem was, in order to keep his audience laughing, he would beat his character’s almost improbably moronic shtick into the ground. Five minutes of Ace Ventura doing his "talking out of his ass-crack" bit at the police station in the first film was funny. But NINETY minutes of it? By the halfway mark, I was begging somebody to zap Jim Carrey’s ass with a tazer to make it shut up.

While Joel Barish never has the chance to manipulate his rectum quite the same way Ace did, the same yearnings for human contact, response, and—dare I say it?—love, are there. Jim Carrey has matured since "Ace Ventura" and "Dumb and Dumber." He has successfully undertaken serious, dramatic roles in films like "The Truman Show," "Man on the Moon," and "The Majestic." But in "Eternal Sunshine…," he performs as he has never done before. This time, the goofy grin of Ace and Lloyd Christmas is a mask that conceals the frighteningly insecure Joel Barish. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jim Carrey act with his eyes, but here he does so amazingly. In them, one can recognize the scared little boy Joel never grew out of, the misfit who was always standing out on the periphery of the party, quiet and alone.

"Valentine’s Day is a holiday made up by large corporations to make people feel like shit." This is one of the first things desperately lonely Joel says after waking up at the start of the movie. True, he says it through voice-over, and a narrow-minded film student might complain that voice-over is a sign of weak narrative. But it makes sense to start the movie partially within Joel’s head. After all, once the movie kicks into high gear, almost all of it takes place there.

How does Joel get in there from here? He discovers that his former girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet, playing the dream girl of every socially-inept, goofy misfit), has undergone a procedure to erase all traces of Joel from her brain. Overwhelmed by the callous nature of her actions, Joel undergoes the same procedure, only to change his mind midway through. As the brain doctors use his memories of Clementine as a kind of road map, deleting backwards from their break-up to the moment they first met, Joel desperately tries to hide her by veering all over the geography of his brain.

Childhood events, traumatic incidents, repressed memories—Gondry’s visual flair is in evidence at every one of these stops. For example, there’s amazing use of perspective and trick photography when we visit Joel Barish’s childhood home. In relation to the kitchen, his mother, and Clementine, Joel is the size of a toddler. Proportionally, however, he looks normal. Then there’s the surreal nighttime set, when Joel is chasing after Clementine. He tries to run from one corner of the block, where his car is parked, to the other corner, where Clementine supposedly is. But he keeps arriving at the same car, and the same streetlight, over and over again.

And who could forget that scene towards the end, where Joel, having lost Clementine forever (Or does he not?), sits in the backseat of his friends’ station wagon, and watches as his memories of her literally flit by outside his window?

Since the brain doctors start with Joel’s most recent memory, then work backward, the structure of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" resembles Christopher Nolan’s "Memento." But whereas the hero of "Memento" constantly had to re-establish the arc of his character (He had to constantly try to re-remember where he was and why), Joel is aware of his journey, and is affected by everything he encounters. His arc, therefore, is straightforward. As his most recent memory of Clementine, then the second-most recent, third-most, etc., are erased forever, he realizes how much he loves her, and is desperate to retain some scrap of her.

Was it necessary to review Joel and Clementine’s relationship this way, starting with their break-up, and ending with how they first met? It’s necessary in order to give gravity to Joel’s journey. By the time he arrives at his first encounter with Clementine, which is his final memory of her, he has lost her so many times that, out of some urgent need for closeness with her, or perhaps truthfulness, before she finally fades away, he reveals himself—something he was never able to do in real life. It also helps that the site of their first meeting contains an event Joel truly wishes hadn’t happened the way it did.

"I wish I had stayed. There are a lot of things I wish I had done differently, I… I wish I had stayed."

The first night Joel met Clementine, at a beach party at Montauk, the two of them snuck into an unoccupied summer house. Clementine went upstairs to look through the tenant’s closet. Joel snuck out. The summer house is literally falling apart in Joel’s memory, about to cease existing forever. As the water from the ocean outside invades the house, washes over the floor, and pools around Joel’s ankles, he knows they’ve reached the end. So he unburdens himself of his regrets. He wishes he had stayed with her in the cabin that night. So many things, he wishes he had done differently. It’s a great scene that actually begins a lot earlier, but it has a dynamite ending. It’s the best scene in the entire movie.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" was written by Charlie Kaufmann, one of the most interesting screenwriters out there. He takes off-the-wall ideas, concepts which might seem impossible to present in a popular format, and humanizes them to the point where they become some of the best examples of the popular form. Kaufmann wrote (or adapted) "Adaptation," which I loved. I enjoyed this movie even more. "Eternal Sunshine…" has a more pat ending than "Being John Malkovich," which many imdb posters believe is Kaufmann’s best movie. True, one could argue that "Eternal Sunshine…" has two endings, and the first one is satisfying enough.

But I would argue that ending #2 conveys an important truth which must not be denied: While it would be convenient, perhaps even merciful, to be able to erase every horrible person we were ever unlucky enough to care about from our minds, the process would only leave us vulnerable to making the same mistakes over and over again (See Kirsten Dunst’s character). The truth is, we need the horrible memories, the bitter endings, the regrets. We need to have our minds spotted. We need the pain, in order to grow as people.