Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

After having a hard time watching and reviewing Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid last night (and forgetting to link it on Facebook), I decided to unwind with a brainless movie.  My mind was a whirlwind of activity, and I needed a mindless story with explosions that I could escape away into.  For some reason, I decided instead to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is far from brainless and requires a very attentive brain.  However, it was a story that completely enveloped me and memorized me in a way that I did not expect.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a great example of what can happen when people take genres and stories outside of their natural habitat and bring a no-holds-barred approach to letting them play out.  With this film, it is a romance at heart with drama elements, but tossed around in a very imaginative blender with science fiction until it is fully integrated with great consistency.  If that does not make much sense, that’s alright because this is a movie that can leave the audience wondering what is going on for a bit of time before allowing the full scope to be seen.

The film stars Jim Carey as Joel, a very ordinary (and some might say boring) man who has a constant look on his face of being uninspired, and always seems to dress perfectly to match such a drab mentality and outlook.  His life changes the day that he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet), who is the exact opposite of Joel as she is spontaneous and extremely colourful, always wearing bright clothes and dying her hair colours to make her stand out from the crowd.  In each other they find happiness and good times, though after a period of time their opposites begin to anger one another and Clementine undergoes a procedure to have Joel completely erased from her memory.  Joel, obviously destroyed by this turn of events, acts against his normal character by being spontaneous and responding by having Clementine wiped from his mind.

The majority of the film takes place in Joel’s apartment over the course of one night, as his memories of Clementine are being erased.  We spend a lot of time inside Joel’s mind, as he relives the memories before they start to disappear.  At first it is the memories of the brutal fights that lead to their break up, but then he starts losing memories of moments that he never wanted to end.  While he is unconscious during the procedure he can hear the conversations of the people who are taking Clementine from his mind and he becomes painfully aware that his time with her is about to end.  We see a man frantically doing everything he can to keep Clementine alive in his mind, and we feel his pain as he loses the battle.

The concept of the film is a very interesting look at how humans respond to pain, how we do not want to accept it as a part of life.  In the office of the doctor of who heads the memory erasing, we see people who are there to forget dead spouses and even beloved dogs.  When people hurt, a lot of the attention turns to eliminating that pain instead of the acceptance of its natural place in our lives.  This far-fetched movie sheds a bit of light into something that many people would probably opt to do just to be freed from the torment of loss.

However, the message of the film is does not linger on the refusal to live with pain, but that the pain of loss exists because there was so much good that has been pulled from us.  Through Joel’s and Clementine’s journey is his mind while it is getting deleted, we see the realization from Joel that the pain hurt so much because he had lost the best thing he ever had, and that when it was time to say goodbye to the good memories he tried everything he could to abort the process or to hide a memory of his love somewhere deep inside his mind.

Winslet and Carey are a wonderful pairing in this film, as their personalities and postures seem to be so vividly different and yet the chemistry that forms between them seems unconditionally believable.  We watch their characters through many different situations and emotions (some of them are rather odd whilst traipsing through the deep corners of Joel’s mind) and the whole time it is a couple that we can feel for and understand.  While they are both quite endearing, they are both also quite flawed with neither one playing the part of the bad person.  I have not even gotten into the supporting cast, which sees talent like Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, David Cross, and Tom Wilkenson.

There is plenty of humour and imagination in this movie, penned by Charlie Kaufman, but the over-riding tone of this film is passion.  The fact that Joel is such a dull, boring, blend in the background kind of guy magnifies his passion when he acts with energy and vigour to save his memories.  We get a true sense that the colour that was added into his world via Clementine has changed his life, and to forget her would be to once again enter into his dismal, coulourless life where he would probably spend the rest of his life with no inspiration or passion.  In the end, for Joel at least, the pain is well worth the life changing love that he never wants to forget.

Rating – 4 out of 4 stars