The director Jim Carrey called a creative genius
Kids might not believe it these days, but Jim Carrey was irrefutably Hollywood’s biggest star for almost a solid decade between 1994 and 2003.
The Canadian’s comically elastic alter-egos Ace Ventura, Stanley Ipkiss, Lloyd Christmas, The Riddler, Fletcher Reede, Truman Burbank, Chip Douglas, The Grinch and Bruce Nolan provided worldwide belly laughs year after year. At the same time, his contemporaries Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp built their own brands in more earnest territory.
There were hints of Carrey’s dramatic prowess at the turn of the millennium when The Truman Show, Man on the Moon, and The Majestic allowed him to ditch the rubber-faced histrionics in favour of pathos, but for many, the best performance of his career came when he teamed up with relatively unknown surrealist Michel Gondry in 2004, who’d only directed one feature in 2001’s little-seen Human Nature prior to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Scripted by the singular Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine‘s title quotes a 1717 poem by Alexander Pope, while its non-linear narrative centres on Carrey and Kate Winslet’s ex-couple Joel and Clementine, who undergo a memory-wiping procedure to rid themselves of each other forever.
Gondry may have been fairly new to filmmaking, but Carrey was convinced he had a bright future. Of course, everybody realised that and was in full agreement when Eternal Sunshine was released, with the Golden Globe-winning comic celebrating the sense of creativity he fostered on set.
“Michel is just a creative genius, but people really haven’t discovered him on a mass level yet,” Carrey told About Film. On Eternal Sunshine, director Gondry rendered his whimsical sensibilities through forced perspectives, spotlighting and manic in-camera manoeuvres. “He comes in every day with something that just spins you around and makes you go, ‘Wow, somebody’s thinking, man! Thank you! This is great! Somebody’s bringing something to the table!'”
Eternal Sunshine would go on to win ‘Best Original Screenplay’ at the Academy Awards, with Winslet earning a nomination for ‘Best Actress’ too. Such was Gondry’s immediate impression on American audiences, he was then hired to direct the documentary Dave Chappelle’s Block Party before stepping into more commercial fare with 2008’s Be Kind Rewind and 2011’s The Green Hornet.
However, the latter was a major flop that showed him to be ill-equipped at trying to marshal a major studio blockbuster where he wasn’t rewarded with complete freedom and autonomy, and Gondry retreated into his surrealist nest by making the independent features Mood Indigo, Microbe & Gasoline and The Book of Solutions.
The two eventually reunited almost two decades later for the tragicomic series Kidding, which was cancelled after two seasons despite the reunion of Carrey and Gondry winning widespread praise, even if it wasn’t quite comparable to their phenomenal first team-up.
