A difficult film to watch

Rating: 10/10 (11 December 2005)

There's absolutely no way I can write about this film without a spoiler, as I think, judging from the comments written up on this site, many seem to have difficulty following the plot. As a general guide, if you're having difficulty following the chronological order of the scenes, it's necessary to follow the changes in color of Clementine's (Kate Winslet) hair. It starts off green, then changes to orange and finally finishes up blue. In the film though, it starts off blue, then goes to orange (the predominant color), then green and then back to blue.
I must say I watched the film with a certain level of discomfort, being constantly reminded of my own break-up. This wasn't helped by my feeling that the Joel character (Jim Carrey) was very similar to myself. The film challenged me to re-evaluate many of the memories I have which I'd purposely buried. This is the dominant theme of the film: our memories and our relationship to them.
The film starts as Joel wakes up one morning feeling awful. It's Valentine's day (his comments about which remind me of things I myself have said). His day simply improves when he discovers someone's smashed in the side of his car, and by the time he gets to the train station he's in such a funk that instead of going to work he impulsively jumps on a train to Montau and later calls in sick. But there he meets someone and they click.
Although we've already seen 15 minutes of the movie, it's at this point that the credits kick in and we watch Joel driving alone in anguish. It soon becomes apparent that Joel and Clementine have just split. Joel is driving home to forget about Clementine forever. He's told by his friends that Clementine's just had him permanently erased from her memory, (a new service offered by a company called Lacuna). So Joel volunteers himself. The company offers to wipe his mind in the comfort of his own home, but during the process Joel in a dreamlike state gets to visit all the recesses of his own memory. At first all we see between the couple is the senseless bickering and the ghastly fights that led up to the breakdown. But then he suddenly comes across a forgotten memory where the couple shared a single tender moment and he remembers his love for her. At this point he starts fighting to save the moment. He tries a number of different stratagems, such as trying to wake himself up, and associating her with memories from his childhood. At first he has some success, but when the "erasure men" hunt down even these memories he's forced to find ever more buried and ever deeper parts of his subconsciousness. But even in the parts of his memory that Joel has almost forgotten himself, the memory of Clementine is systematically rooted out and destroyed.
Most poignant for me is probably the way the film portrays our desire to forget, so that we can block out the mind-numbing pain. When Joel is told to collect together all the things that may remind him of Clementine, he collects together two black bin liners full of stuff; I remember the ambivalence I felt to many of the things I myself once had (and coincidentally I also have a photograph from when my ex was about 8). Another point which touched me was the portrayal of the Eakin's (the mutual friends of Joel and Clementine who'd introduced them.) We see them arguing openly in front of their friends, slowly destroying their own marriage, which in the light of what's happened between Joel and Clementine looks like infinite folly. The film clearly shows the way in which we tend to ignore and take for granted the love we have for our partners and then how we often only realize after being rudely reminded by the pain of separation.
The final scene is when both Joel and Clementine have found out that they had once been lovers. Joel is sitting at home and listening to the tape from his case file. Clementine, on hearing some of the mean things that Joel had told the "doctors" about her, runs away. Joel runs after her and begs her to stay. This is juxtaposed with their real first meeting where the roles were reversed and Joel was the one to chicken out. The relationship starts anew.
Jim Carrey's performance was absolutely stunning. I would never have dreamed that he could play a shy, reserved and introverted man with both subtlety and compassion.