A clever, touching look at ending relationships. It's just not funny.

Rating: 7/10 (28 March 2004)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind looks not only at relationships themselves but at how important people in our lives affect everything that revolves around us.
Jim Carrey plays a man who's girlfriend (Kate Winslett) has had him erased from her memory by Lacuna, Inc. (headed by Tom Wilikinson). In retribution, Carrey's character pays to have his memory erased of all knowledge of her.
The film is played out through out-of-sequence scenes and bizarre imagery. This is a trend of many independent films (the recent 21 Grams is an example). I am not a large fan of bizarre filmmaking (I usually find it too pretentious), but here it is used pretty effectively to show the erasure of the lead character's memories of the ex-girlfriend.
The big problem in this Jim Carrey movie: it's really not very funny, and his character isn't incredibly likeable. The journey the character goes through is indeed fascinating, but the character himself is humorless and bland. They should have injected him with a soul, then we could have cared more.
There are some great moments with the Lacuna staff (the highly unethical trio of Mark Ruffalo [outstanding in this film], Kirsten Dunst and Elijah Wood). There are some quirky moments with the free-spirit only adequately played by Kate Winslett. And I do like the ending, both the poetic justice of the plot summation, and the question "how do you recover a relationship when both parties know what you really think about each other." But I'll only give it 7 out of 10.