Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) has a clever idea for a plot that
is executed by a rather oddball crew of artists. In the director’s chair you
have Michel Gondry, a French filmmaker whose creativity is always recognisable
no matter the project. On writing duties you have Charlie Kaufman, known for
writing screenplays that seem to take on a life of their own. Then in front of
the camera you have Jim Carrey in serious mode, which doesn’t always work, but
the results are always interesting.
When the movie
came out I was still used to the idea of Jim Carrey as a manic comedian since I
grew up watching him in movies like Ace
Ventura and The Mask. When he is
in a drama you almost always expect him to eventually burst out and talk out of
his butt. That might be why Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not one of his biggest box-office
successes, but even 13 years ago I could see this is a very smart movie dealing
with deep ideas. Its characters are all convinced that in order to move on with
their lives they should use technology to erase bad memories from their
consciousness, an idea I sometimes find appealing. However Kaufman and Gondry
seem to argue removing memories is akin to removing the symptoms and not the
disease.
Carrey’s character,
Joel Barrish, is a shy and withdrawn man who had the luck of meeting Clementine
(Kate Winslet), the kind of extrovert who dyes her hair blue and approaches
strangers on a train. They had a great relationship for a while until things
unfortunately soured and ended with a bitter breakup. Things were so bitter
that one day Joel runs into Clementine and she has no memories of him because
she had them erased by a medical firm out of New York City.
Feeling betrayed,
Joel decided to scrub Clementine out of his mind just like she did and never
have to relive the painful memory of their breakup. He has worries of course.
When going over the procedure with Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) he asks about
the possibility of brain damage, to which the good doctor replies: “Well, technically
the procedure is brain damage, but
it’s on par with a night of heavy drinking.” Well gee, isn’t comforting?
Yet Joel agrees
to the procedure and at night technicians played by Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood
and Mark Ruffalo come into his house to plug all manners of electrical devices
into his head while he sleeps. This is when the movie starts to get visually
creative as it jumps around Joel’s memory as the technicians erase all traces
of Clementine. What Joel hadn’t thought about before signing off on this
brain-damaging operation is that the technicians are also erasing the good
memories of Clementine, which he realises he would like to keep so he starts to
fight the procedure. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we see the technicians
are having relationship problems of their own and that this technology might
not be a perfect solution for heartbreak after all.
Getting inside a
person’s brain allows Gondry and his team to have all sorts of fun, whether
it’s having people completely vanish from a scene, jumping to Joel’s childhood,
or Joel running into a faceless man because he only remembers seeing that man
from behind. Over the years plenty of TV shows and movies have surpassed this
concept, especially Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which has characters dig three layers
deep into a person’s subconscious. However Gondry’s film still holds up both in
terms of visual effects and ideas.
By the movie’s
end most of the characters have come to the realization that erasing some of
your bad memories is not going to make you feel any better or change who you
are as a person. The old saying “those who do not learn history are bound to
repeat it” seems to apply to people’s personal history as well.
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