Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: 2004, dir. Michel Gondry. Seen at Alamo Village (April 10).
I am writing this review much later than I intended, but it took awhile for me to get my thoughts in order about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
It doesn’t matter that it’s been nearly a month, I still think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a beautiful, splendid movie. And now at least I don’t have to worry so much about spoiling the movie for other people, since the buzz has been out and about and most people know the general premise. (If you haven’t seen it and don’t know, you probably don’t want to read the rest of this.)

I wish I hadn’t known the premise before I saw the movie, because if you went into it cold with no expectations or knowledge, you wouldn’t know right away. Joel (Jim Carrey) decides to go to the beach on a whim, he sees a woman he doesn’t know there named Clementine (Kate Winslet), who strikes up a conversation with him on the ride home, and they fall in together, starting the tentative beginnings of what might turn into a serious relationship.
And that’s when we flash back to find out that Joel and Clementine had been involved with each other for years, that after a one-more-round-of-hell fight she goes to a place called Lacuna to have her memories of him erased entirely, and when he sees her next she doesn’t know him at all. As a kind of revenge, and because he’s too hurt to know what to do, he has his memories of her erased.
I knew that before I saw the movie. What I didn’t know was the way in which we would witness his memories of her fading away. While the overnight memory-erasing procedure takes place, we go into Joel’s brain with him and see his subconscious fighting to keep a memory of her, falling in love with her more as she is stripped out of his mind, playing tricks that the technicians have never seen before in order to keep her from being erased. I really liked the way in which the movie showed this happening, it was innovative and involving and a pleasure to watch.
I also didn’t know about the secondary-couple subplot. Traditional romantic comedy films include a subplot with a secondary couple. The secondary-couple subplot often illustrates the theme of the movie much more clearly and graphically than the plot with the main couple. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may be a nontraditional movie in many ways but it does utilize this traditional subplot device very successfully with Kirsten Dunst.
I have to say I was most impressed with Dunst’s performance. She always seems to be underused in films like Spider-Man and then you see her in movies like this one and The Cat’s Meow and she is truly wonderful. We see her at first as a secretary who almost worships her boss and the work he does, then we watch as she reaches out to him emotionally and even romantically … and then we find out with her that she’s done this before. And had her memories of it erased. Suddenly her entire attitude towards the procedure changes and her response is critical to the film’s conclusion.
Joel, Carrey’s character, was a bit bland, his personality was practically non-existent, he was rather uptight, somewhat amusing, and his creativity and quirks were shown through his illustrations rather than his actions. But there are people like that. And I felt this was intentional on the part of the writer and filmmakers. Perhaps his low-key personality enables us to impose a personality on him, to let him remind us of an old boyfriend or husband or lover, or of qualities in our own selves? This gives us more personal identification with the scenario and the characters.
And following that line of reason, Clementine would naturally be more colorful and interesting. He’s the lover, she’s the beloved, and she has to have a strong and memorable personality so we can see the effect it has had on his life. I mean, just compare their names: Joel, an ordinary guy’s name, and Clementine.
I liked the structure of this movie. It was linear, but you didn’t know that … I mean you didn’t know the track the movie was going to follow. Yes, it does fly back and forth and around the calendar a lot, but that makes sense, considering the storyline.
The thing about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is that whether or not it is objectively a good or well-made film, it is intended to strike a personal chord in its viewers. Every person in the theater is thinking of their own experiences and memories, of whether they would want parts of their lives wiped from their minds.
The movie has been made specifically to generate that reaction. It is a very clever movie, but its cleverness is harnessed to create this personal, emotional atmosphere. This works beautifully and saves the movie from becoming one of those “too clever for its own good” films like Adaptation (also written by Charlie Kaufman).
Because of the movie’s structure, we realize earlier rather than later the hopeful message that these two people (Joel and Clementine) cannot be kept apart, that despite their own efforts to erase each other from their minds, there they are again.
And it is this soaring, optimistic message that we can see but the characters cannot (except perhaps Elijah Wood’s character, Patrick, who refuses to accept it) that sticks in our minds and therefore overrides any pessimism in those lines that Joel and Clementine exchange at the end of the movie. The ending reminded me of Annie Hall, it was rather Woody Allen-ish in terms of looking pessimistic but feeling weirdly optimistic. They know the relationship might ultimately fail, they know they have idiosyncracies and personalities that are irritating to each other, but they’re going to try it anyway.
The movie uses its clever structure to tell us that there is something organic, mysterious, and ephemeral about love that goes beyond mere likes and dislikes, objects and paintings, and even memories, as we can see when slimy little Patrick tries to woo Clementine using the objects that Joel discarded in his attempt to erase all his memories of her.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a terribly romantic film but without all the predictability and cliches that are so prevalent in mainstream romantic comedy films today, and that is perhaps why it seemed like such a lovely surprise, such a charming film, much less overtly clever and much sweeter than I would have thought a film written by Kaufman would be.