flamepillar's Full Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Do you ever just wake up and think, "How did I end up here?" Do you sometimes get so lost in the past that you lose all awareness of the present? Do we erase who we are to make our lives more palpable?
Do we think we're the only ones who do it?
Well, if those are questions of interest to you, you might just be ready for a shot at Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a movie that is quite unlike any other I've seen. While jotting down notes of the movie the next day, I became the (willing) victim of a myriad of emotions. It's still sinking in.
It's hard to say exactly what kind of story this is. You find yourself starting out with something simple, something you can make sense of. Man is standing at train station, man makes a sudden run at the last possible second to a different destination. He meets a girl, they talk a little bit, they start going together, and everything seems fine.
Well, if you are a fan of the Memory Movies, you might recall a certain Leonard Shelby who once said, "Memories are an interpretation, they're not a record." What does this have to do with it? You don't want to know.
So you're 15 minutes into the movie, guy sits helpless in his car. Outside, it rains cats and dogs. Must have been a breakup. But then, get this. Title. Opening credits. 15 minutes into the movie.
Meet Joel (Jim Carrey). Lonely guy, can't look a woman in the eyes if she's a stranger. Not too far from Stanley Ipkiss of The Mask actually, but very much more down-to-Earth, as in Pete of The Majestic. He met this girl, then something happened and he saw something he wasn't supposed to see...
This is a hoax, right? Not exactly. A little company called Lacuna makes it possible for a person to remove another person from his/her memory by destroying everything that person has that pertains to the relationship, then going into the brain and zapping away all the memories that pertain to the relationship. The next morning, you wake up like it all never happened. I love the following exchange:
Joel: "Is there any risk of brain damage?"
Doctor: "Well, the procedure basically is brain damage."
Does this make any sense at all? Okay, well here's a little enlightenment on just how this happens and what exactly goes on. When a person has a memory destroyed, Lacuna puts him/her under at the lab. Then they bring the person home to his/her bed with all the equipment. They finish erasing the memory there, then they leave with the equipment. Person wakes up, it's done.
The real magic of the movie has to deal with specific aspects of what happens while the memory is being erased. If you're like me, you're probably figuring that the movie is about the aftermath of doing such a thing. No sirree, the movie is about the doing of it.
The majority of the movie takes place right there inside Joel's mind while his memory is being erased. So what happens? Well, it's in his mind -- anything can happen!
I won't get into the specifics of the whole movie-watching experience, but it's definitely the kind that will make you forget what planet you are on when it's over. The memories make the movie -- they tell you about the characters, they tell the story and ultimately, they lead to an ending which is, of course, based back in a very bittersweet reality.
Jim Carrey has definitely got the serious roles down. Much ado has been made about his fans abandoning him because of his not giving us another Bruce Almighty. How many times have we been through this now? The guy's versatile. He's a pendulum. If you've seen him in The Majestic or The Truman Show, you've pretty much seen him here.
I've never been a huge Kate Winslet fan; something about her eyes makes her look like she's always on the verge of freaking out. Aside from an ever-changing hair color, there is not a whole lot to the character of Clementine. At times, I was actually anxious for him to get her out of his memory because it didn't feel right when they were together. At the same time, though, I'm a lazy person who complains about being alone but knows that it could be because of my laziness that I am. So that could be more my problem than the movie's.
Elijah Wood and Kirsten Dunst offer supporting roles as Lacuna workers, and offer a bit of comic relief in the real world when we're not exploring the collapsing tunnel of Joel's mind. There is something hilarious about seeing a clean-cut Frodo try to seduce a woman. As for Kirsten Dunst, well, she's the good girl who does the right thing in the end, but she too had some awkwardly funny moments with seducing a guy twice her age, dancing in a tank top and panties, or talking about how stoned she was.
There are a few small things I found slightly irksome about the film, one being the overly harsh lighting. Everything seemed so ugly, and it always seemed to be overcast. Second would be the use of the nickname for Joel, "Joel-y". Dude, he's not Angelina. Third, I don't recall hearing the ELO song "Mr. Blue Sky"! I didn't stay through the credits, though, so I can't say for sure.
So I am left with a lot of questions. Not about the movie, but about life. Things like -- if you could erase memories like that, would the love disappear too? Does Love only exist as a by-product of past experiences? What do they really mean by "hindsight is 20/20"? Are we more acutely aware of the distant past than the present?
And I do have a few questions I could ask about the movie, but I'd be prone to...
SPOILERS
Okay, how about this one. What if he's caught in a loop and he's been creating and erasing these same memories again and again? Why would he want to remember her when he just caught her sleeping with another guy? And what's the big deal with him being able to hear the conversations occurring in the room at the same time as certain memories are being erased? It doesn't matter what he might "learn" that way if the memory dissolves seconds later.
Unless...
Here's another one. This is the one that baffled me the most. What was up with the scene where he walked in on himself looking at the objects? I think I might have come up with an answer to this one, but the logic is shaky at best. I think when they destroy a memory, they have to "remove him" from it first so as not to mar his self-image. Or something. So when looking at the objects becomes a memory (albeit a 10-second old memory), they go to erase that memory of looking at objects (they said they'd start with the most recent ones and go backwards). Joel sees that memory from an objective point-of-view, from the outside so to speak. Then the memory dissolves. It's up to Joel's imagination whether or not the other people in the memory hear what he says to them, but even if they could hear him in the memory, it wouldn't change reality.
I think that Lacuna unwittingly deleted more memories than just the ones with Clementine in them, because of Joel's "carrying" her to other places in his memory in an attempt to save her. This forced the Lacuna people to delete those memories (bath in the kitchen sink, encounter with bullies, hiding under the table, etc.) and this is why Joel keeps telling Clementine he's not an interesting person and that he has nothing to say, because he lacks a lot of his old memories. He could have taken her to half of the memories in his life for all we know.
END SPOILERS
...
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is a thinking person's movie. I'm reminded in some ways of the diced-up time sequence of 21 Grams while also being reminded of the introspective vibe of Lost In Translation. I sense something incredible here that I can't put my finger on.
You might want to ask "Well, is it a good movie?" But like many others, Eternal Sunshine answers a question with a question -- "What do you mean good?"
From acclaimed writer Charlie Kaufman and visionary director Michel Gondry comes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. An all-star ensemble cast shin...More at Buy.com
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