Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I have put off this review for a bit because I don’t really know what to say about it. Did I enjoy it? Yes definitely. Do I think about it after the fact? Of course, the characters may be screwy and the story may be surreal and distorted, but like Lost in Translation its characters have a depth that makes you think about their lives beyond the film and wonder about their motives. But do I know how to describe it? Not on your life. The film is a series of memories of a relationship shown in reverse detailing the falling apart of a romance between Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski. Jim Carrey plays Barish in perhaps his most pathetically endearing and heartfelt role to date. Barish is cautious and reserved never offering more than is necessary in words or in himself. Kate Winslet plays Clementine an adventurous woman whose hair color changes with her mood from bright pink to violent orange to electric blue. They discover a bizarre courtship as they meet on a beach in Montauk in winter. She glances and he thinks ‘Why do I fall in love with every woman I see who shows me the least bit of attention?’ Then when she approaches he backs off unwilling to be drawn in by her adventurous nature. But of course he is and they begin to spend time together. Then 15 minutes into the movie the opening credits appear and the world is turned backwards and upside-down.

The film is from the screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Charlie Kaufman has explored the way the human mind works through a number of different devices in his stories. In Being John Malkovich characters actually reveal themselves by entering the mind of John Malkovich and altering his life, and their own. Of course the outer manifestation of this is the puppet master and the puppet. Again in Adaptation Kaufman presents a story within a story illuminating human desires and abilities. Perhaps Adaptation was more scattered than his other works because it deals more directly with the writer and the way he shapes the world of his imagination through his writing. Whatever the reason, the film is not as effective as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as it delves into the memories of an ordinary relationship.

In Eternal Sunshine there is again a story within a story built into the film. First is the story of the workers at Lacuna, the company which touts memory erasing as the solution to life’s problems. The office is staffed by the quirky characters Dr. Howard Mierzwiak and his assistants Stan, Patrick, and Mary played well by Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, and Kirsten Dunst. Their part in the film follows the days where they meet with Joel Barish and agree to modify his memory and their overnight work in doing so. Their relationships, like so many, are filled with deceit and role-playing as they hover between happiness and sadness. Tom Wilkinson is understated as Dr. Howard an enabler but not of the action himself, he begins the motions but lets others follow them through. Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst run the gamut from love to work to drugged frenetic energy and back again in one day and their performances are strong. Elijah Woods alone seems out of place in the story. Granted his role is a difficult one, a pathetic assistant who falls in love with a patient and uses her file to get close to her, but his performance is distant, he seems more sleepy than desperate. Luckily the film focuses on the second story, more important both emotionally and in screen time, is the relationship between Joel and Clementine played out in reverse through the fragmented and eventually erased memories of Joel.

The principal of Lacuna’s work is that they ask a patient to bring in all of their memorabilia about whatever the specific thing is they wish to forget. The employees then map out the locations of those memories and then remove them. It results in a kind of controlled brain damage. Of course as Joel begins to go backwards through his memories of the relationship he realizes that he does not want to forget Clementine even though he has been so hurt by their relationship. He tries to stop the memory erasure process midstream by hiding memories of Clementine in his childhood and various other places but the darkness of forgetfulness catches up with the pair in even the most hidden of memories.

Overall this film deals with regrets, the regrets of the actions we take, the things we say, and the ability to take them back. The characters come to the realization that the greater regret is not of having bad memories, but of losing the good memories that generally accompany them. The film begins with heavy use of voiceover in the scenes of the first 15 minutes preceding the credits and the start of the reverse narrative. It comes full circle as the voiceover at the end provided by the tapes that each has made as their reasoning for having their relationship erased are aired. The question it ends with is, if you know there is going to be pain do you take the risk to enter the relationship? With this movie the answer is a resounding yes.