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Rating: R
Director: Michael Gondry
Writers: Charlie Kaufmann (story & screenplay), Michael Gondry (story), Pierre Bismuth (story)
Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, Thomas Jay Ryan
Release Date: June 6, 2014 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 48 minutes
THE PLOT:
via wiki:
Joel Barish discovers that his estranged girlfriend, Clementine Kruczynski, has undergone a procedure to have her memories of him erased by the New York City firm Lacuna. Heartbroken, he decides to undergo the same procedure. In preparation, he records a tape recounting his memories of their volatile relationship.
The Lacuna employees work on Joel’s brain as he sleeps in his apartment so that he will wake up with no memory of the procedure. One employee, Patrick, leaves to see Clementine; since her procedure, he has been using Clementine’s memories of Joel as a guide to seduce her. While the procedure runs on Joel’s brain, the technician, Stan, and the secretary, Mary, take drugs, party, and have sex.
Joel re-experiences his memories of Clementine as they are erased, starting with their last fight. As he reaches earlier, happier memories, he realizes that he does not want to forget her. His mental projection of Clementine suggests that he hide her in memories that do not involve her. This halts the procedure, but Stan calls his boss, Howard, who arrives and restarts it. Joel comes to his last remaining memory of Clementine: the day they first met, on a beach in Montauk. As the memory crumbles around them, Clementine tells Joel to meet her in Montauk.
In Joel’s apartment, Mary tries to impress Howard through their mutual interest in poetry by reciting a verse from Eloisa to Abelard. While Stan is outside, she tells Howard she is in love with him and they kiss. Howard’s wife arrives and sees them through the window. Enraged, she tells Howard to tell Mary the truth: Mary and Howard had previously had an affair, and Mary had her memories of it erased. Disgusted, Mary steals the Lacuna records and mails them to the patients, including Joel and Clementine.
Joel wakes up on Valentine’s Day with his memories of Clementine erased. He impulsively takes the Long Island Rail Road to Montauk and calls in sick to work. He accidentally meets Clementine on the train ride home; they are drawn to one another, and go on a date to the frozen Charles River in Boston. Joel drives Clementine home and Patrick sees the two of them, realizing they have found each other again. Joel and Clementine receive their Lacuna records from Mary and listen to their tapes together. They are shocked by the bitter memories they had of each other and almost separate again, but agree to try again.
My Review:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an excellent film that utilizes a science fiction premise to tell an incredibly insightful and moving story about human psychology and one couple’s unique relationship dynamics. Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay is built on the premise that the technology exists to erase someone from your memory, in order to remove negative emotional baggage associated with them. It’s a play on the idea of “my life would be better if we’d never met.” Anyone who has ever had a bad relationship can relate to the idea. However, the film makes a compelling argument on behalf of lived experience, grief, and pain while simultaneously providing hope to anyone who can accept those feelings along with the rest.
Joel finds out that his impulsive girlfriend of two years, Clementine, has had this memory-erasure procedure done after a particularly ugly fight the two had. Unable to cope, he decides to have her erased in turn. Most of the film takes place inside his mind and his memories, as his procedure is underway. Though he is asleep and cannot call the whole thing off, he decides while unconscious that he would rather keep the pain of their breakup than to lose the good memories, too. The bulk of the film ends up being a fight between his unconscious mind and the procedure, wherein he tries to hide memories of Clementine from the people and machine trying to erase her. As this occurs, Joel processes his relationship with Clementine and comes to a better understanding of what got got from it, as well as how and why it failed. Ultimately, Joel – with the help of his memory of Clementine – works to try to preserve her in his mind and to some extent they seem to succeed. While both have their memories wiped, they find each other again at a place they agreed to meet, and seem to start over. Though we don’t see it on screen, we also get to assume that something similar must have happened for Clementine during her own memory wipe because she seems to seek Joel out, just as much as he seeks her out.
If that were all, the movie would be plenty clever. However the story also explores the potential for abuse of this technology. Elijah Wood’s Patrick uses his experience as a memory-eraser, along with his first-hand ties to both Clementine and Joel, to date Clementine. Even with the cheat codes of knowing exactly how her brain works, and what she likes, his effort doesn’t work for long. The screenplay seems to tell us that the connection and chemistry between two people goes deeper than their experiences together.
We also see that the inventor of the technology has used it to erase the memory of Mary (Kirsten Dunst), his young employee, to make her forget that she had an affair with him previously. This creates the scenario wherein Mary eventually finds out that this happened to her and then tells all of Frank’s patients – recently reconnected but still mind-wiped Joel and Clementine included – about what was erased, including audio tapes of each complaining about the other.
The movie seems to end on a positive note. For the first time, Joel and Clementine accept each other for who they are and start their relationship anew.
There are a lot of really great scenes in this movie but I think my favorites were during Joel’s attempts to hide Clementine in his deep past, in memories where she didn’t belong, and where he hoped the erasers wouldn’t look for her. Both Joel and his memory of Clementine got to see him as a four year old being ignored by his mother. She was also present as he relived the shame of killing a small animal, as a kid, when peer pressured to do so. Joel came to an understanding of himself and the events that shaped his present-day personality by bringing her (in memory form) with him to those places. He realized he’d never been open enough with her in real life, and why.
After his procedure is over, Joel and Clementine reunite at Montauk, the place where they met initially, and they then meet again for the first time. This location was a great choice by the writers because Montauk is so heavily associated in real life with classified experiments concerning the mind – MK Ultra, psychological warfare techniques, and the like. The connection makes the science fiction feel more like just regular fiction. Arianna Grande even talked about something similar recently during an interview, so who knows… maybe it is real.
While the star of the film is the screenplay (it won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay), the performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet make it work. Both bring to life two very different people and imbue them with so much chemistry that you can believe them as real people and accept their attraction to each other. I enjoyed being reminded that Carrey is an excellent dramatic actor. In fact, he was so good in this movie that he got a Best Actor nomination at the Golden Globes. Kate Winslet in particular had a difficult role, making Clementine – who is impulsive to the point that she walks a line between being functional and needing serious psychiatric care – into someone who is both realistic and so charming that you understand why Carrey’s Joel falls in love with her. She was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for the performance. She pulled off the changing hair color thing, too.
The movie has a very early 2000s musical and visual aesthetic, with angsty pop-rock music from bands like The Polyphonic Spree and The Willowz, and a director in Michael Gondry who previously spent a lot of time directing music videos. The music and visuals definitely date the film, but over twenty years later, the aesthetic really works and fits the mood of the film extremely well.
Overall, I really like this movie and recommend it highly. It’s smart and philosophical, with a unique approach to examining relationships and the mind, while also maintaining a very strong emotional core. Eternal Sunshine is also extremely well-acted. Carrey and Winslet both give fantastic performances and have great on-screen chemistry together. If you haven’t seen this film before, or haven’t seen it in a while, I recommend giving it a rewatch.
Have you seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? If so, what did you think?