Conveniently, The Science of Sleep Comes With Its Own Review Title

Michel Gondry, 2005

The Science of Sleep is the following:

1. Clever
2. Beautiful
3. Funny
4. Innovative
5. Etc.

Michel Gondry, dear Michel Gondry, is a great director, but can't hack it without a good writer like Charlie Kaufman helping him out. The entire movie feels like it lives inside one of the Gondriest parts of Eternal Sunshine – the part where Jim Carrey is running around being a tiny full-sized kid in pajamas in his own memory. Hooray! That part is so cute and funny and wild! Two hours of it, however, made me involuntarily embark on my own scientific experiment of zzzz.

I read a review by Jim Emerson that made the point that this film was an expansion of one of Gondry’s shorts (something the man has down pat, short films, music videos, things that don’t have the potential to drag on and on for six hundred years), and that the film would have been much more successful had it stayed limited to 30 minutes. Personally, I agree with him, and so do the people I went with, and the entire row of people who walked out of our theater mid-film (I didn’t witness this, because I was sleeping, but I was told that it happened), and my cat Arthur, who zoned out while I was explaining it to him.*


Wait a second....


...Didn't we already use this gimmick before?

Forgive me this comparison, Emily Brown**, because you know how I feel about this particular subject, but it’s kind of like listening to countless Tori Amos interviews. At first you’re sort of intrigued and delighted by how she actually believes that she received her check for Under the Pink royalties from a teeny elf dressed in spiderwebs. His name is “Tippy” and he doesn’t walk forwards, he walks backwards, exclusively. Tippy sings T. Rex songs at the top of his lungs, and he and Tori often sit on her back patio and drink tea and talk about Russia.


Tori Tori Tori WHY WHY WHY?

“Hee hee, Tori! You’re so wacky and novel!” you say gleefully. But after years of patiently and doggedly following Tori through her little phases and sticking up for her when your friends joke about it, you start to get sort of angry.

For Tori hardly ever speaks like a normal person. She can’t drop the Faerie Queene act for five seconds and just tell you what she actually thinks about her music,*** celebrity,**** or politics.***** And as a result, you, a loyal fan of her music, begin to wish that you’d never picked up Boys for Pele at Circuit City when you were 16, even though her music is solid.



Therefore I am risking having my stuff packed and put out on the curb by the time I get home today (Kelly’s words, not mine. Science of Sleep fans, like Tori fans, are rabid), but all of the poignancy of The Science of Sleep was lost on me because it was simply too obnoxious and not cohesive enough. The New York Times and everybody else loved it, and Tori Amos probably saw it fifty times, Kells, if that’s any consolation. Now stop being mad at me.



*Granted, he’s a zoner.
**Emily Withrow, you will rejoice.
***Magical gifts from an Indian goddess
****A chance to dine in a glen with all sorts of one-eyed sprites.
*****Lots of big bad boys gabbling on about whosits and whatsits and smashing each other up into tiny pieces like babies!!