A Valid Defense of Film Director Michel Gondry

I am so SICK of PEOPLE knocking film director Michel Gondry as little more than a surrealist hack with a knack for adapting the perverse and cracked prismatic visions that pour forth from Charlie Kaufman's magic pen, or used to at any rate. People lay that pat analysis out there like that's all there is to say, all the fucking time, and nobody ever calls them on it! It's become like, the perceived or received or accepted wisdom on the guy and his career, and what he amounts to. Well I, for one, DIS-A-FUCKIN'-GREE!

Gondry is a visual inventivist easily on a par with a LeBrilliet or a Paubert. He spins your eyes inside the camera like a shit-hot DJ in the club spins your ears inside the beats! beats! beats! In films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Being John Malkovitch*, Gondry's masterful manhandling of the mise-en-scène manages to be never both confusing and intrusive as it carries the viewer along the sliding puzzle-path of the plot, delighting eye and mind alike with grace notes and visual counterpoints that perfectly serve the story.

Yet ironically, Gondry's seamless yet effortlessly audacious visualizations of the story twists, expectation flips, character tumbles and other myriad plot gymnastics wrought by Kaufman's limber, contortionist brain have brought Gondry not praise, but relegation to second-banana status. People seem to think his real gift consists in adapting Kaufman and not much else.

But how fair is that? How come everybody says "well what's he done besides his best work with Kaufman," but nobody asks what Kaufman has done apart from his best work with Gondry? I mean, what has he done? A couple self-indulgent duds and an episode of "Cheers"!

It was a pretty cool episode, I admit. You saw the one where Carla and Rebecca each dream that they've awoken inside each others' psyches, resulting in one crazy day up until the part where it's revealed that Woody was the puppeteer pulling the strings behind the whole thing, using some special voodoo hick mickeys that he slipped them both in the mistaken belief that it would cure them of their respective neuroses? A solid episode of a now-classic sitcom, and one which - if you squint - pretty strikingly prefigures some of the best of that then-young writer's future brilliance.

Okay okay, I admit that a few of the supporting facts in this valid defense of film director Michel Gondry may have been made up, but if postmodern scholarship has taught us nothing, it's that all facts have pretty much been made up.

Also, by no means should anyone construe any of this as a knock on Charlie Kaufman's talents. Charlie is a real leading light in an industry populated for the most part with jaded pros churning out derivative hackwork. It's true that I have beef with him going way back on a separate matter, but it's beef marinated in admiration, seasoned with appreciation, and well-braised in a tart, complex sauce of deep respect, and perhaps leeks.