MOVIE REVIEW: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
MOVIE REVIEW: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet) 1/2
One of the scariest and most terrifying of questions that can be asked of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is: how many more memory loss and memory alteration movies are still waiting in the wings to be released? Over the last five years, Hollywood has been pumping them out by the bushel, and in doing so the screenwriters of said projects are flogging the horse, because there's able to use the premise as a scapegoat for skipping over plot details they'd normally have to cover in a conventional script. Fortunately, Eternal Sunshine has more redeeming aspects than drawbacks, but everything that works has been done before, and been done much better as well.
The film bounces backwards, forwards and sideways through time. Jim Carrey is Joel Barish, a quiet loner who meets a high-strung woman named Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet). Their encounter is blunt, awkward and sweet all at once. We soon discover that this is not the first time they've met; both have undergone procedures to have the memories of each other erased after a relationship of two years has gone sour. The company who performs the mind wipes is Lacuna, a second-rate office run by Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his small, bumbling staff comprised of Stan (Mark Ruffalo), the conniving Patrick (Elijah Wood), and Mierzwiak's adoring receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst).
While the events of Joel's procedure transpire more or less in real time over the span of one night, inside his mind he is reliving the series of events that led up to his break-up... in reverse. So it starts with less-than-ideal love spats with Clementine and eventually builds to the magical happenstances that led to their first meeting each other. Bit by bit, pieces of Joel's memory are erased by the Lacuna employees, and as he relives some of the happier times, he decides he doesn't want to have these keepsakes gone, so he starts trying to devise ways to cheat the deletions and running away from them as best he can. In some of the film's weaker scenes, this becomes Joel's flashbacks to when he was a child.
I am, of course, simplifying the plot. Charlie Kaufman's obtuse screenplay frequently skates close to coherence, but then it veers off into other directions over and over. Where a film like Vanilla Sky cleverly employed visual "echoes" to ground the viewer between dream states and reality (particularly in its thrilling final 15 minutes when it tied up all its symbols), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind delibarately creates visual fractures, sometimes even changing colours or items in scenes just to throw the viewer off even more. This makes for a more frustrating viewing experience and forces us to focus on things other than Joel and Clementine's relationship and other themes inherent in the movie.
Visually, the film is exquisite. The cinematographer Ellen Kuras does not resort to special effects to create the inside of Joel's mind. Rather, she uses focused lighting with dim bulbs or narrow beam spotlights, and coy depth of field shots to create illusions and scattered memories. Kuras's work deserves an Oscar nomination in the new year. As does Kate Winslet's work as the complex and unpredictable Clementine. The laissez-faire attitude she brings to her character perfectly offsets her strong positions on matters of the heart. Jim Carrey is equally good as Joel, although the playful scenes in which he recalls his childhood threaten to undermine the credibility role because of the number of silly movies he's been in thus far. The supporting cast of Lacuna employees are effective in their scenes, particularly whenever new discoveries about their characters emerge over the course of the evening.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind broaches the subject of painful break-ups in a highly interesting manner. Given the opportunity to erase a relationship from our heads, would we be better off for having done so? After all, those memories, no matter how painful, help to form the kind of person we become. All too often, it is easier to focus on the bitter aspects that come at the end of a long-term union then to remember the happier times, because that's human nature. I appreciated the way the movie dealt with these kinds of question, despite the fact that the framework was sloppy around the edges. Then again, given the messy nature of separations, maybe this is director Michel Gondry's very point exactly.
