Carrey Leaves the Geeks Behind

[ILoveMalibu]

From www.theglobeandmail.com<br><br>Carrey leaves the geeks behind<br> <br>The actor who makes teenage boys laugh their guts out transformed himself into an introverted romantic for Charlie Kaufman's latest foray into real life<br> <br> <br><br>By STEPHEN HUNT<br><br> <br>UPDATED AT 12:35 PM EST Saturday, Mar. 13, 2004 <br><br><br>LOS ANGELES -- A buzz-cut, low-key, casually dressed Jim Carrey stands in the doorway of a hotel suite, as gracious as a concierge, and waves me into his room. Outside the wrongly-named Four Seasons Hotel, Beverly Hills is its warm and sunny self on this particular Saturday afternoon in early March. <br><br>Inside, we've all gathered to meet the people behind Carrey's latest film, Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Almost nothing is out of place at the Four Seasons: There's silverware made from real silver, porcelain cups and saucers for your mint tea, and linen napkins. The kitchen makes killer homemade chocolate chip-pecan cookies and walnut fudge brownies. Actually, the one thing out of place is us. We're movie reporters from all over North America -- including a large contingent of college newspaper types -- who don't tend to frequent four star hotels in Beverly Hills and who dress, for the most part, like characters from a Kaufman film: mismatched, ill-fitted, all-covering bodies that could charitably be described as lumpy.<br><br>In a way, though, that's perfect. You see, writers love Kaufman films, because Kaufman, c'est moi. What about brooding movie stars who earn $20-million (U.S.) a picture? That's a different story. But this particular movie star, dressed in jeans, a pullover shirt and tan suede jacket, looks about as broody and menacing as a paperboy. "C'mon in!" a smiling Carrey says, as if by being from The Globe and Mail, I represent a break from the hordes covering his new film rather than being one of them.<br><br>No actor plays broader characters than Carrey, our generation's Jerry Lewis, a man whose onscreen persona is more Seussical than Method. Carrey's characters in films, ranging from Bruce Almighty to The Grinch to Dumb and Dumber to the Ace Ventura, Pet Detective films, have made millions of teenage boys laugh their guts out, earned studios billions of dollars and turned him -- a gawky tall guy from Southern Ontario -- into one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world. <br><br>In fact, his buzz cut is for a new part -- Count Olaf in the film adaptation of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, just the sort of over-the-top signature role Carrey is best known for.<br><br>And yet here he is, along with Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo and Tom Wilkinson starring in a quirky art house film: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Frenchman Michel Gondry, and opening next Friday.<br><br>In the film, Carrey plays Joel, a guy so shy he finds making eye contact with anyone impossible. Despite being obsessively solitary, Joel becomes involved with Winslet's Clementine, a Barnes & Noble "book slave" who's needy, never stops talking and changes her hair colour the way most people change clothes. For a while, these two have a thing going on, but like a lot of relationships, the magic soon wears off. That's when Joel discovers that Clementine has been to a special doctor to have her memories of him erased, so that she can get on with her life. Joel responds by getting the same doctor to erase his memories of Clementine, but problems arise when Stan Fink (Ruffalo), the technician supervising Joel's mind erasure, screws up the process, leaving him to discover that forgetting Clementine is trickier than he anticipated.<br><br>The film might best be described as a "dream logic film" filled with the unique sense of unreality that permeates every film written by Kaufman, the only screenwriter who believes watching people think can be fascinating (it can). In Spotless Mind, there are elephants marching through the streets of Manhattan, winter sequences (shot on Long Island) by the Atlantic Ocean that look as if Carrey and Winslet woke up in the middle of a Tarkovsky film, and, overall, a bizarre combination of the absurdism of Kaufman blended with a melancholy one has never, ever associated with Carrey's films.<br><br>"It's definitely on the menu," he says, of the switch from blockbuster to art house. "I made no money, it was freezing, and I just loved doing it." In fact, the film was shot in New York and Long Island over 53 days in January and February last year, which turned out to be one of the coldest winters in decades -- the Hudson River froze over for the first time in 15 years, which prompted director Gondry to shoot scenes of the different actors lying on the ice.<br><br>The character of Joel, a solitary, monosyllabic, sensitive guy, is the least Carrey-like role he's ever played, or at least seems to be.<br><br>"It wasn't that difficult playing an introvert," Carrey says, "because I think under that, I'm actually that kind of guy. Joel is a guy who just has no way of dealing with the world. He's broken, and along comes Clementine, who's kind of his mirror opposite, this person who is able to get all this craziness out."<br><br>Carrey's approach to the part, he says, was that "I think he [Joel] was trying to hide from the world. He just wanted to stay hidden under everyone else he came in contact with."<br><br>Jim Carrey? Hidden?<br><br>Carrey admits it was difficult to resist the temptation to be "interesting" on screen, in that way he's been interesting movie goers since his breakthrough. "Yeah, sometimes I would worry, but the thing is, sometimes you think you're doing this really interesting stuff and it actually isn't all that spontaneous." Instead, Carrey refuses to comment on his character at all. With a wool cap pulled low over his forehead, gripping his notepad like a lifeline, he plays the part so thoroughly true to itself you actually forget it's Carrey playing Joel. <br><br>"Jim came to me on the weekend before we started shooting and asked for homework," says Gondry, a 30-something French commercial director who also directed Kaufman's script Human Nature. "Naturally, I had none, but I wanted to make something up, so that he would think I am a good director, and let me keep my job. I told him he had to spend the whole weekend and never to talk about himself. In every conversation, he could only ask questions about his friends and talk about them. I wanted him to learn to be very passive. A listener. And obviously he did."<br><br>Rather than yet another listless Hollywood romantic comedy about the ecstatic discovery of one's mythic soul mate, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for all its dream logic, is firmly rooted in the messy, in-between ground most people's relationships occupy. Just when you grow exasperated trying to piece together the narrative thread of the film, it suddenly hits home with anyone who's ever had to struggle with the one they love -- in other words, all of us. <br><br>"We were trying to show that relationships aren't just these ideal situations, that they sometimes have a middle, that sometimes having to struggle in your relationship is what you do, because it beats aloneness," Carrey says.<br><br>The interview is almost over now. Carrey is telling the story of how the movie poster came into being purely by accident -- Carrey and Winslet lying on the frozen Hudson River next to a big crack in the ice -- and how that single image perfectly captures the theme of the film. He compares it to a Chagall painting, about fallen angels. And despite the fact that he's a movie star, you get the feeling that Carrey -- who has had several well-publicized failed relationships -- knows more than his share about solitude. Who'd have thought it? After a decade of thrilling teenagers with his burps and farts and facial contortions, he's all grown up now: Jim Carrey, c'est moi.<br><br> <br> <p></p><i></i>