Steven King’s no Charlie Kaufman

JOHN DEPKO

‘Eternal Sunshine’ writer effectively twists reality

A Charlie Kaufman screenplay is Hollywood’s version of a Kurt

Vonnegut novel illustrated by Salvador Dali.

The characters inhabit surreal landscapes where ordinary reality

intertwines with dreams, memories and outright hallucinations.

Seemingly normal people jump back and forth in time and space,

merging the past and present with a mysterious future. The chief task

for the observer is to figure out which category of human

consciousness is actually on the screen at any given moment.

Kaufman presents a wild montage through the plot device of a

scientist who can erase all memories of a specific person from your

mind, resulting in the “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”

In this latest effort, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are perfectly

cast as an everyday Gen-X odd couple. Carrey is shy and reserved,

while Winslet is outrageous and impulsive. Kaufman takes the many

events of their relationship and chops them up into discrete

segments. A dinner here, a phone call there, a trip on a train, an

intimate moment together, a nasty argument, etc. He then sprays all

these events onto the screen in random order, mixing past, present,

memory and fantasy with dizzying effect.

Following a lover’s spat, Carrey and Winslet both hire the good

doctor to erase all their memories of each other. It’s during the

erasing process that most of the movie unfolds.

You can’t tell a “real” sequence from a fading memory about to be

erased, until the scene begins to dissolve like a melting clock on a

Dali canvas. But through all this madness, Carrey and Winslet

maintain a genuine emotional rapport between their characters, which

makes us ponder the true meaning of life, love and relationship in

the face of an ever-changing reality.

In “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” Kaufman broke new

ground in the way a movie depicts the nature and functions of the

human mind. With humor and sly sarcasm, Kaufman presented the bizarre

and improbable as things that could be common and possible. “Eternal

Sunshine” is his third effort in this strange and wonderful vein. It

definitely evokes the surreal, but the surprise factor has been

diluted by the similar twists and turns of his previous works. Still,

his movies remain unlike anything else out there.

* JOHN DEPKO is a Costa Mesa resident and a senior investigator

for the Orange County public defender’s office.

Depp shines through in otherwise broken ‘Window’

Fresh off his Oscar-nominated performance in “Pirates of the

Caribbean,” Johnny Depp again gives us a colorfully eccentric

character in “Secret Window,” the latest film adapted from a Stephen

King novella.

Mort Rainey (Depp) is a famous writer stuck for a beginning to his

new book, and also wallowing in depression over his impending divorce

from wife Amy (Maria Bello). Sleeping away the day in a tattered

bathrobe in his remote cabin in the woods, he sports the craziest

hair since Jack Nicholson stuck his head through that door in “The

Shining,” which should give you a clue as to what to expect from this

movie.

A mysterious man in a grim black hat appears and proclaims that

Mort stole his story. He hands him his manuscript and announces he

has three days to disprove it. Thinking, rightly, the man is a

crackpot, the manuscript goes into the trash. Upon later reading the

first paragraph, however, Mort is shocked to find it is indeed,

word-for-word, his own exact story, “The Secret Window.” Mort claims

to have written it first, and can prove it was published in a

long-ago edition of “Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.”

The stranger, John Shooter (John Turturro) doesn’t believe him and

begins to make good on his threats before Mort has a chance to “make

things right.” Mort’s dog is brutally killed, his house is broken

into, he and his wife are being followed and lots of things go bump

in the night.

Mort is reluctant to contact his wife to get a copy of the

magazine. He doesn’t want to hear about her relationship with her new

boyfriend (Timothy Hutton), and he certainly doesn’t seem anxious to

tell her the fate of their dog. So, he unplugs the phone and snoozes

some more on the couch, until escalating violence forces him into

taking some action.

Perhaps we’ve now become all too familiar with the Stephen King

playbook -- we’ve seen all of his plot tricks before. This movie is

as scrambled as Johnny Depp’s hair.

There’s talent in this movie -- like Depp, Turturro always excels

at playing over-the-top nut jobs. You can almost feel the spittle in

your face when he talks. But the others in the cast -- Bello, Hutton,

Charles S. Dutton, and Len Cariou -- are one-dimensional characters

in what plays like a made-for-television movie.

To sum it up, I think all of the logic must have gone out that

“Secret Window” along with the styling gel. Why didn’t Mort just go

online to get a copy of his story? Why didn’t the police get more

involved? And did they have to kill the dog?

* SUSANNE PEREZ lives in Costa Mesa and is an executive assistant

for a financial services company.