Year: 2004
Genre: Sci-Fi Drama
Directed: Michel Gondry
Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Adams, David Cross, Thomas Jay Ryan
Production: Focus Features
The film starts with a man, Joel Barish (Carrey) and a woman Clementine Kruczynski (Winslet) meeting on a train on a cold February morning. Their conversation is awkward and strained . Are these the two people whose company we're meant to enjoy? Are we supposed to root for a relationship to bud? Before the audience even asks such questions, we're whisked away to Joel driving in his car sobbing and listening to the somber tones of Beck. We see the awkward beginnings, the bitter end, all within the time frame of five minutes.
Through the singular orbits of Joel and Clementine's we're introduced subtly to the film's major sci-fi conceit. In an impetuous rage, Clementine has erased Joel from her memory. Joel is notified via a letter from Lacuna Inc. a company that specializes in such procedures. Feeling the pain of rejection and the anguish of a relationship brought to an unceremonious end, Joel asks to have the procedure of erasure done to him as well. Dr. Mierzwiak (Wilkinson) agrees to help and scans Joel's brain for signs of Clementine.
The lion's share of the film is spent inside Joel's head in a bizarro dreamworld where people, places and things are in the process of being erased. Halfway through the erasure, Joel decides he'd rather keep his memories and tries everything in his capacity to keep any retention of Clementine. The creativity involved in keeping semblances of Clementine, combined with the tactile nature of the film's set-pieces provides some of the film's biggest thrills.
Director Michel Gondry is often dubbed the mad scientist of cinema. "I have a duty to make something different," said the auteur during a 2008 interview with The Telegraph. Yet unlike his music videos which are beautiful departures into surrealism,
Eternal Sunshine is well grounded in the rules it sets for itself. There are some admittedly Freudian explorations but don't expect
Spellbound (1945)-esque ruminations on repressed sexuality. If anything,
Eternal Sunshine more closely resembles
The Blood of a Poet (1932) in both it's emotional resonance and it's funhouse imagination.
Eternal Sunshine is a film about relationships; the ones we choose to remember, and the ones we wish we could forget. You can tell Joel and Clementine are a bad match, one being too passive and mousy, the other too brash and prone to histrionics. Yet the one thing these two characters have in common is a petrifying melancholy; a need and desire to be with someone...anyone! Knowing this frees the viewer up to experience their hardships, celebrate in their quiet moments of companionship and even relate with piercing memories of love and lost love of our own.
The film's largest triumph is it's ability to cut through all the noise of it's own creation. All the dazzling special-effects, complex characterizations and anxious spells of emotional climax fade into flashes of beautiful silence. These precious moments, such as the iconic hand-holding scene along a frozen lake provide the audience with thoughts of acute clarity. We exist, we fall in love. We fall out of love, we make mistakes and sometimes due to stubbornness or forgetfulness, we repeat those same mistakes. Usually though, if you take a few moments of quiet reflection you may just learn something.
Final Grade: A
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