‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave…’

Review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Awards, nominations, and box-office cred don’t always go hand in hand, and though Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind managed to garner Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Charlie Kaufman), Best Actor (Jim Carey) and Best Actress (Kate Winslet), it failed to draw the crowds. But it has a small and devoted following, and many otherwise well-adjusted people have been known to watch it several times. Wherefore such allegiance from a small and likely more discerning crowd? I set out to discover the truths behind the myths that have come to surround this controversial, love it/cannot abide it, movie.

Variously billed as romantic comedy or contemporary sci-fi, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is much more than the sum of its parts, and certainly cannot be pigeon-holed into any convenient category. Thought-provoking and highly original, it manages to inject a dose of surrealism into the portrayal of a highly realistic and cunningly plausible world--one that we all know, but for the one significant anomaly.

‘Here at Lacuna, we have a safe technique for the focused erasure of troubling memories…’

Joel: Is there any risk of brain damage? Doc: Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss.

And therein lies the premise.

Your faithful pooch got run over? Have him erased from your memory and forget Fido ever existed! Your lover jilted you? Relationship ended badly? Wipe the miscreant from your life and mind! Don’t waste time mourning a lost love. Save yourself a whole lot of grief.

Who wouldn’t? Would you?

Joel Barish (played with sensitivity and depth by Jim Carey in one of the finest performances of his screen career) finds out that his erstwhile girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet channeling the Mother of all Ditzes) has erased him from her memory. Still in love with her despite their tumultuous relationship, his disbelief, anger, frustration and despair culminate in a desperate ‘I’ll do the same thing with you!’ act of bravado, one that he immediately regrets.

Unconscious and at the mercy of a drunken, drugged-out, trio of inept and startlingly unethical employees of Lacuna Enterprises, Joel struggles to keep them from erasing his memories of Clementine. What follows is a journey through Joel’s mind as he revisits his relationship with Clementine while he desperately tries to ‘hide’ her in his deeply-repressed childhood memories where they’re harder (but not impossible) for the technicians and the doctor to find.

Throughout the movie, the use of special effects (nothing fancy, just some very clever use of lighting and judicious editing) adds to the surrealism of the sequences where Joel lies unconscious and is frantically trying to hold onto his fraying memories of Clementine. Incidentally, I’m surprised the film did not get nominated for Best Editing. Icelandic Valdís Óskarsdóttir really did a remarkable job.

All in all, I was blown away by this movie, not least by Carey’s performance. I never liked him much in his antic roles, but his portrayal of Joel Barish is flawless, though of course it must have helped that the character is so well-conceived.

The supporting characters did their job adequately, and if I had one complaint, it’s related to what the character played by Kirsten Dunst did at the end of the movie when she found out something she wasn’t supposed to find out. Though this could relate to the moral of the story.

Watching the movie, I was reminded of the quote: ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.’ If we choose to erase someone from our memory, we’re basically deceiving ourselves into thinking something didn’t happen when it actually did. How are we supposed to learn from our mistakes if we don’t remember making them in the first place? Are we doomed to repeat our mistakes over and over, thereby setting ourselves up for a pattern of self-destructive behavior? And what if there is such a thing as fate or destiny? If we erased someone whom we’re destined to end up with, wouldn’t we meet that someone once again somehow?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind appeals on many levels. It may not be a box-office hit, but, to me, it’s a successful movie in that it’s both entertaining and thought-provoking. The performance of Jim Carey, in particular, is wonderfully layered and understated, the script smart and witty, the visuals stunning, the editing out of this world.

The movie challenges the audience to try and come up with answers for questions we may never have considered. It asks many big questions about the nature of memory, love and relationships, life and destiny. But perhaps most of all, it points out that there is no such thing as a perfect relationship, that we have to take the bad with the good, and even if we can see the writing on the wall, we still have to move forward. There can still be joy in every little moment that works. Regrets are simply par for the course, and mistakes are made so that we can learn from them. To be truly alive, we have to live, and we have to experience the bad with the good. We hurt each other, but then, hopefully, we learn to heal, not just ourselves but other damaged human beings around us.

As another reviewer put it so succinctly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a journey into the beauty—and fragility—of connection.

It also shows us what it means to love and be loved. Highly recommended

J.C. Hall is the author of the fantasy novels 'Legends of the Serai' and 'Lady of the Lakes'. The sequel to Lady of the Lakes will be published by Zumaya Publications. Her poems have appeared in various fantasy magazines while her non-fiction writing includes book reviews and travel articles. You can find out more about JC and her work by visiting Her Website