Film Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
           (Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope, 1688-1744)

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders
           (Nietzsche, 1844-1900)

let them drink and forget their poverty
and remember their misery no more.
           (Proverbs 31v7)

Joel : Is there any risk of brain damage?
Howard : Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss.
           (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)

It seems that we’ve always wanted to forget certain things; bad memories, traumatic experiences, poverty and even broken relationships. Whilst the desire to forget goes back far beyond King Lemuel’s rather unhelpful advice in Proverbs, as technology advances we are finding more and more ingenious ways to escape from that which we don’t want to think about.

Micheal Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explores the issues surrounding our desire to forget certain memories. What would happen if technology made it possible to forget something or someone completely? Would it be a mercy killing of painful memories or are even unhappy recollections somehow important to us. Gondry made his name producing a series of Bjork videos and the Smirnoff advert, Smarienberg, that wowed cinema audiences again and again. His clever fluid visual style perfectly compliments Charlie Kauffman’s (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) slightly surreal screenplay, whilst simultaneously drawing out Jim Carrey’s maturest performance to date.

Carey has undergone a sort of reverse metamorphosis in recent years, changing from the extravagant show off of Ace Ventura to much more restrained performances in The Truman Show and Bruce Almighty. Eternal Sunshine sees him complete the transformation. Carey’s once much vaunted "rubbery face" has aged a bit, (it’s fairly unlikely he’ll be the next face of Oil of Ulay), but he has learned how to use it to maximum effect. He perfectly captures the mix of unhappiness, fear and confusion that someone would feel if they discovered by waking up in their fast disappearing memories that getting them erased may not have been such a bright idea. But Carey underplays it beautifully and whilst the film does have moments of humour, Carey is the straight man, relying on the other actors, or just the strangeness of his circumstances to lighten the mood.

It’s also new ground for Kauffman in a manner of speaking. Whilst the two scripts he wrote for Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) also entailed getting inside their protagonist’s head (quite literally in Being John Malkovich) their outlook and view of human nature was unrelentingly bleak. Here Kauffman captures at least a glint of light even though the final shots retain a sense of ambiguity. In the process he raises all sorts of questions about the value of memories, and challenges the well worn cliché that ignorance is bliss.

In the lengthy prologue to the film we find Joel (Carey) meeting Clementine (Kate Winslet) for what appears to be the first time. They hit it off and as they return home together. But after the opening credits finish it becomes apparent that we are now at a slightly different point in time, and inside Joel’s head as his memories of his two year relationship with Clementine are being erased by the Lacuna corporation. As the memories of the final days together disappear Joel "forgets" the things that caused the relationship to break up and tries to halt the process. Joel and his memory of Clementine dash from one decaying memory to another, desperately trying to stop his memory of her from being destroyed.

It’s in these scenes that the Gondry-Kauffman combination works so well. Gondry blends the dissolving memories with convincing ease, his complex visuals reflecting back on to the audience the disorientation of the lead characters within the plot. If someone had said at the start of the year that one of its best films would be a Jim Carrey vehicle, you’d suspect that either you were in a Charlie Kauffman film, or that they’d had one too many Smirnoffs. But this year, who knows?

Rated 15 for language (?)

Posted by: Matt Page on Sunday Nov 14th, 2004

Comments

Logged-in members can post comments on openheaven.org news articles.

Back