We start Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind tritely, yet brutally, enough: the narrator says that he believes that Valentine’s Day “is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.” For the majority who has at any point in time been loveless on Valentine’s Day, that strikes an all-too-familiar chord, without being grossly sentimental or over-acting. Jim Carrey not over-acting? You have to see it to believe it.
The movie moves on sweetly, if not innocuously, enough—Joel Barish (a restrained Jim Carrey) gets a sudden urge to go to this god-forsaken place called Montauk on a wintry Valentine’s morning. There he meets a strange woman with blue hair, Clementine, who is the perfect wild-child foil to his brooding reserve. It is strange, though, that Joel has never heard of the song “O My Darling Clementine”. Cut to Joel, in the car, crying his heart out. Charlie Kaufman writes a delightfully strange love story in the vein of “Somewhere Down The Road,” but with brain damage.
Apparently Joel and Clementine have met before, they have become lovers and their relationship died a bitter death. Joel finds out, after seeing Clem with another man, that she has had him erased from her memory at Lacuna, Inc., a company that offers the service. Vengeful, he goes to Lacuna and decides to do the same. In what is like a strange trip, Joel’s mind gets erased one memory at a time, in backward chronological order. However, in the middle of the procedure, Joel decides that he does want to keep some memories of Clem, and a weird but suspenseful pursuit follows as the Lacuna technicians try to follow the memory of Clementine even as Joel hides her in his deepest darkest memories. The story loops back around itself, but eventually unravels, much to our delight.
This race to keep Clementine’s memory alive, as well as the goings-on behind the scenes with Tom Wilkinson’s groundbreaking doctor, technicians Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood, and Kirsten Dunst as the receptionist who has a strange fondness for Bartlett’s quotations about memory, including the one from which the movie derives its title, from Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard: “How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!/The world forgetting, by the world forgot./Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!/Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.” Aside from the basic love story of the leads, the intricate goings-on among the Lacuna staff are also integral to the movie.
Kaufman and director Michel Gondry (the uber-video director) weave their magic in a movie which is strange science fiction; but when all’s said and done, it is at its heart a quirkily human love story. Jim Carrey is effective in his restrained performance, quite a mean feat for the known over-actor. Kate Winslet is constantly proving herself to be a steady actress far more versatile than she could have been stereotyped for after Titanic. The supporting cast, especially Ruffalo and Wood—far removed from Hobbiton—give strong performances, even the doctor’s wife in her short scene.
There are other little details that add to the effectiveness of the story: references to the dining dead, insightful comments from the characters, Joel’s forgetting even Huckleberry Hound, a childhood staple, because of his song “O My Darling Clementine”. Carrey’s comic side finally gets some release in the scenes where he is trying to hide Clementine’s memory in the deepest darkest recesses of his brain, acting out as a four-year-old and as a horny teenager. The memory couple’s awareness that they are being erased provides an added element to the urgency of the pursuit through Joel’s head. Kaufman’s masterful script and Gondry’s visual manipulations combine to make a movie that is earmarked for the MTV generation but can charm even the older crop.
Dunst’s Mary says, “Adults are like this mess of sadness and phobias.” How true. A lot of traumatic experiences, not a few involving heartbreak, leave indelible marks on our lives. How marvelous it must be to be able to start anew, on a clean slate. This leaves us to ponder, though, will knowing what happens in the past prevent people from making the same mistakes in the future? Some people, perhaps, are just destined to repeat their mistakes for sheer obstinacy—and maybe human nature. The whole process of painful memories surfacing once in a while is, after all, cathartic.
Some people say that this movie did not make sense. In fact, most of the time, love doesn’t make sense either. Most of the time falling in love or falling out of love is not the sensible thing to do; but it happens. What is important is it was done. And if memories are purged, as if that love never happened, it can’t seem that we will be the better for that, because that is part of what makes us what we are.
