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Review

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Director

Michel Gondry

Year

2004

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Monday, August 02, 2004

Adaptation. (2002) brought many good things to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, including (though I’m not sure how good he considers this to be) the key to becoming the best-known screenwriter in Hollywood; among audiences, that is. Do you often hear people talking about screenwriters, or how good the script was, or that there was a script at all? My guess is, not often. Most people don’t even think about the people who sit down to write a motion picture, they just think about the result, and the actors, and sometimes the director, but that’s it! Kaufman is now so well known that his movies are more his than anyone else’s, and in the case of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you’ll probably hear more talk of Kaufman’s work than the director’s. It’s great! Justice for screenwriters! But it’s so odd… Has the world gone mad??

No. Kaufman’s scripts are bizarre, wicked, and brilliant. Eternal Sunshine is an addition to his line of brilliant scripts, and it’s no wonder he’s getting so much following. Really, who else could come up with these ideas and put them together so well?

The film tells the story of Joel (Jim Carrey), a man saddened by his loneliness, who suddenly meets Clementine (Kate Winslet), and shares with her an immediate, unexplainable attraction. Thing is, they’ve been together before, in a hazardous relationship, and they both got their memories of each other deleted by Lacuna Inc., a company that does this kind of job.

After this introduction, we go back to see Joel take the decision to delete his memories of Clementine, resentful of her own decision to delete him from her mind. It’s not an easy decision of course, but it’s certainly an easy task, if it wasn’t because Joel changes his mind during the “operation”, and mentally tries to escape from the procedure. It’s all a trip inside Joel’s mind as he tries to hide Clementine (or her memory) somewhere in his memory where she shouldn’t be located. It’s a fun trip inside someone’s memories and also a melancholy look at former relationships.

As a matter of fact, this movie is quite easy to identify with if you’ve been tormented by a relationship and forced to quit it, and though you know it’s for the best, you can’t help longing for those days, and that person who loved you as intensely as you loved him or her.

An apparently irrelevant subplot has technicians Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood) performing the operation, with Lacuna Inc. receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst) dropping by. Mary and Stan are in some sort of relationship, while Patrick has started a relationship with a patient using her deleted memories as tools. As I said, this subplot seems irrelevant, but it’s full of shockers and revelations concerning Patrick and especially Mary, when things get complicated with Joel, and Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), their boss, is forced to show up and help.

Eternal Sunshine is not as pleasant a trip as other Kaufman-written films, notably those directed by Spike Jonze. Somehow, here the show is messy, disorganized, abruptly edited, and overall unsettling. I loved the scenes inside Joel’s mind, with Jon Brion’s music accompanying them to perfection, but outside, in Joel’s room, things were plain ugly. I mostly blame director Gondry for that.

Nevertheless, the procedures are irresistible, and the ending makes up for many flaws in the process. Just watch all those storylines get together, and you’ll be fascinated. Plus, though the characters are rather unlikable, they’re remarkably well performed, with Carrey amazing as a dull, anxious man, Winslet terrific as a neurotic, impulsive woman, and Dunst outstanding as a dumb girl with much more to say than one would expect her to.

In the end, this is a movie about the human condition, and how memories can probably be shut down, but feelings simply cannot. In that way, it’s quite a triumph.

“Meet me in Montauk…”

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