Director Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is one of my favorite movies. He followed that up with The Science Of Sleep, a movie I completely hated. So, I was unsure of how much I’d like this latest of his directing efforts. While I didn’t hate it or anything, I give it a marginal thumb down.

Writing: Having been written by Gondry as well, it’s pretty much impossible to lay the blame for the failure of this film anywhere but him. The intentions of the story are charming enough, but the approach is too child like and naive for its own good. Add to that the fact that oversimplification of everything doesn’t feed into the fantasy aspects of the story all too well. If you’re going to play a substantial amount of fantasty into a plot like this, you need to try to ground things in reality as best as you can so that it doesn’t all feel strange. Despite some obvious attempts to do so, it just doesn’t work. And the narrative never flows smoothly enough. It all feels forced and disjointed.

Production: Despite a handful of clever shots (including the “camouflage” moment - easily the best single bit in the film), everything about this movie feels way too amateur. Yes, I know that amateur is the obvious intention of the film, both on screen and in the story, but it just FEELS too amateur to not be distracted by it. The Science Of Sleep suffered from the same problem (but it lacked any good performance, and had a story that was 100% nonsense). The production does a marginally adequate job at capturing the local community feel, at least. Otherwise, I found nothing particularly impressive about anything in the production. The more I consider it, the more I think Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind was a random fluke. Gondry seems to be entirely too earnest with his sincerity and strangeness, and the levels of amateur he brings to productions hurt things more often than help. He’s done some mind-blowingly cool things in a few music videos over the years, so he’s clearly capable of higher creative qualities. Somebody just needs to make him grow up a bit.

Cast: While the three leads are typically capable of good performances, their characters lack that extra spark to bring their performances out to their best potential. What you get is basically the actors doing what they do, as though they were only cast in the roles because the characters required what they were particularly good at. Jack Black plays the charming but clumsy goof, like he has in a great many movies. Mos Def is the also-charming but aloof character that’s slightly more grounded than Black, and his casting is equally obvious. Then you have the painfully obvious casting of Danny Glover as the patriarch to the two. It works well enough to keep the film from sucking. It’s probably the only move that managed to accomplish the film from completely failing. And hey, Sigourney Weaver gets to put in a brief appearance.

Music: Jean-Michel Bernard, the composer that Gondry used for The Science Of Sleep, turns in an equally obvious, indie-styled score. Yeah, it’s quaint and cute and earnest. And like much of the production, hits things too squarely on the head.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.