Memory can change...the heart prevails

Rating: 10/10 (15 August 2007)

It's hard not to fall in love with a film that begins with a voice-over saying (paraphrasing): "Valentine's Day was created by card companies to make everybody feel like crap." Right afterward, I watched Jim Carrey force himself through a half-closed train door, and I said, this is for me.
Carrey, in a complete turnabout, plays Joel, a lonely man who falls in love with a lively, quirky nut named Clementine. The romance progresses, fights ensue, and one day, Joel walks into the bookstore where Clementine works, and she's making out with someone else and doesn't seem to even recognize him. Then their friends receive a note saying that Clementine has erased Joel from her memory, and they shouldn't mention him again. Joel heads to the clinic himself to find out what's going on. There he finds programmers who can draw a map of your memories about an individual on the brain and get rid of them. Joel decides to have the procedure. Part of the way through it, he tries desperately to stop it, to find some way to remember Clementine, bringing her into places and memories where she never was. The programmers (Elijah Wood, Thomas Ryan) don't notice anything odd about the procedure because they're busy drinking, dancing in their underwear and doing drugs with Mary (Kirsten Dunst) a secretary at the clinic. When they finally notice a problem, the head man (Howard Wilkinson) is called in. Slowly Clementine disappears from Joel's brain as he desperately tries to hold onto her.
A spectacular story with a few twists along the way, and spectacular acting, particularly from Carrey, Winslet and Dunst, make this a real winner. Carrey is a sympathetic, warm character, Winslet is adorable and charming, and Dunst is a complete natural, be she stoned in her underwear, trying to talk sense under the influence, or crying. They are wonderful as is the rest of the cast.
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is about the death of memory but not of emotion and the cry of the heart that goes on - sometimes without knowing why. A beautiful, beautiful film.