Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Director: Michel Gondry
Context:
In the early 2000s, director Michel Gondry, known for his surreal and experimental emotional approach to filmmaking, received a suggestion for a new story: "You get a card in the mail that says: someone you know has just erased you from their memory..." Working with Charlie Kaufman (creator of mind-bending films such as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation), the two explored the concept of how memories affect the connections people make.
Jim Carrey was cast as the lead, marking his third major turn in a dramatic role, and his first in which he doesn't play a character with any comedic traits (The Truman Show allowed Carrey to flex his comedic muscles in a more dramatic storyline while Man on the Moon portrayed him as comedian Andy Kaufman). This was regarded as a successful move on his part and it was my love of those previous two films that drew me to see this one.
The eventual hyper-realistic look at love and memories told within a science-fiction premise caused Eternal Sunshine to become a film that I cherish the most. It is the best Valentine's Day film.
Plot:
After discovering that his free-spirited and impulsive ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has erased him from her memory, the shy and restrained Joel (Jim Carrey) opts to have the same memory altering procedure done to forget about her. Through the course of the procedure, as Joel revisits his memories of Clementine in a dream-like slumber, he changes his mind and fights to save one last memory of the woman he loves.
Analysis:
Eternal Sunshine is a film that requires your full attention because it is very confusingly, yet cleverly crafted. The film doles out enough clues into how everything fits together, but it makes for a disorienting first experience. But, because this movie is practically begging you to watch it multiple times, you are able to enjoy it whether it is your first, second, or umpteenth time through.
The first 18 minutes of the film are when the film is at it's most simple and even though the science-fiction time bending element hasn't been introduced yet (that we know of), Gondry still manages to make a charming and realistic first impression with our two main characters. We follow Joel as he wakes up on the day before Valentine's Day. He feels a bit lost and just shuffles through his day. Something in him decides to impulsively skip work and take a trip to the beach in Montauk, despite the cold weather. While there, he encounters Clementine and the two strike up a conversation on the train ride home.
It's clear from the start that Joel and Clementine are from two vastly different worlds. Clementine dresses in loud colors with brightly colored hair and takes no issues in conversing with complete strangers. Joel is very reserved and closed off and visibly frightened by Clementine, yet it is that panic that attracts him as well. He notes that he falls in love with any girl who shows him the slightest bit of attention so he doesn't know what to do when Clementine throws herself at him. They are a mismatched pair, but each provides something the other wishes they had.
This is a long time for what amounts to a pre-credits opening sequence, but it works very well because the next 18 minutes are the most confusing for a first time watcher. We find Joel and Clementine at the end of their relationship, with Joel in tears outside her place. He returns home in a funk while being followed by a mysterious van. He falls asleep as the men in the van enter his home. They hook him up to some strange device and we journey into Joel's mind.
While that sounds super gimmicky, Gondry uses that uneasiness and confusion about the situation to pique the audience's curiosity. Joel's mind memories are presented in a stream of consciousness, dream logic style, where events combine with one another occasionally and Joel himself naturally reenacts previous moments of his life while also remembering what is happening in the present. He knows he is getting his mind erased and we learn this in a backwards chronological order of the events of Joel and Clementine's relationship.
More confusion seeps in as we view scenes of Joel and Clem's past that don't quite line up with where we saw them at the start of the film, and it isn't until around the 36 min mark that we get definitive evidence that the scenes of Joel and Clem we saw at the start of the film where actually taking place the day after this procedure, not before. The whole film up into this point has been told backwards.
There is more than one romance at play in this movie, though, which I thoroughly appreciated this time through. The employees of the mind-altering service Lacuna, Inc. aren't just there to facilitate the plot. They are fully developed characters in their own right, with their own romantic demons and desires. Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, and Kirsten Dunst use the night of the procedure to indulge in their own emotional whims, which causes issues when Joel's procedure doesn't run as smoothly as planned and he overhears some of their conversations and tries to actively resist erasing Clementine.
These moments of the film are when the movie is at it's most fun and surreal. As Joel tries to change his memories, he continuously runs into road blocks when he encounters moments that never existed in the first place. For example, in one memory, he had a fight with Clementine and she walks out of his car down a street. In the actual event, he didn't chase after her, but in his mind he wants to, so he keeps following her down the sidewalk as she keeps switching what direction she's walking so he can never actually catch up with her. It's hard to explain, but visually it feels just like a dream when the thing you want is always just out of reach.
But for as cool as the film looks and as clever as it's told, the reason this movie works as well as it does is because it feels like we are watching our own love lives play out on screen. Anyone who has ever fallen in love can find some element of the story to identify with. Whether it be with Joel or Clem or anyone of the Lacuna employees, we have all been in the position of suffering from the highs and lows of love.
Especially after a heartbreak, we can feel as if we would have been better off having never met the object of our desires, and this film just presents us with the "be careful what you wish for" scenario that we've never really seen played out in a film as accurately confusing as this one does.
The Ending:
Despite having watched this film twice before, I had actually completely forgotten how it ended. I knew that the original script was going to show that Joel and Clem had gotten the procedure done many times and were just trapped in this cycle of meeting and forgetting, which is a cute idea, but it kind of takes away from this uniqueness of having it done once.
Instead, we have Kirsten Dunst's character Mary reveal the truth to Joel and Clem by way of sending all of Lacuna's patient's their file and tape recordings of describing why they want to forget the person they have opted to forget. Joel and Clem each receive their tapes on Valentine's Day after their wonderful day of meeting each other again. They are basically presented with a vision of the future, everything that will go wrong in their relationship should they choose to have one. It's unpleasant and bizarre, but showing some growth, the two decide to take a chance anyway.
It's an ultimately optimistic message for this story to take. Yes, we want to forget and avoid those that have hurt us. But 'tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. No relationship is going to be perfect, but they are all worth the risk.
Final Thoughts:
There is so much going for this film. I'm a fan of Gondry and Kaufman's heady films that cause you to ponder the inner workings of the mind. I'm a fan of Carrey opting for dramatic, realistic roles. And I'm just a fan of Winslet, Wood, Ruffalo, and Dunst in general. Every aspect of this film works perfectly. There are so many cool, little touches that you could spend a day dissecting each one. But the beauty of the film truly lies in the fact that despite how surreal it is, it feels so real.
Gondry allowed his actors to behave naturally and virtually improvise scenes while he quietly controlled the camera operators to catch new and unexpected moments. There is a common theme of genuine confusion and surprise that crops up when reading the behind-the-scenes trivia for this film. Winslet playfully punches Carrey hard in the arm during their train scene, Ruffalo pops out of a different corner for each take to scare Dunst, and an impromptu scene is filmed when a parade just happened to be going through New York and Carrey and Winslet just enjoy it moments before Winslet secretly loses herself in the crowd. We are seeing these characters as truthfully as we can.
We see humanity in this film. We see love. We see sadness. We see ourselves. We see the relationships that we don't want. And we see the relationships we do. We see something that we never want to forget. And that's why I love this film.
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