An interesting sci-fi romance with a difference

Rating: 8/10 (10 March 2011)

Usually when I sit down to watch a Jim Carrey film I end up getting a little irritated by his excessive gurning; thankfully there is none of that here. Carrey plays Joel Barish a man who decides to skip work one day and takes the train to Montauk where he takes a walk on the beach, later he meets Clementine, a girl with bright blue hair who he gets talking to on the way home. He offers to take her home and then something strange happens he goes to see her at the shop she works in and she acts as if she doesn't recognise him and later he is told that she has had all memories of him clinically erased! He goes to the clinic and after learning as much as they are free to tell him decides to have all memories of her erased too. Things then get rather complicated as he relives various moments in an apparently long relationship as they are deleted, during the procedure he realises that he doesn't want to forget her and tries to find a way of protecting at least one memory of her. Meanwhile the people erasing his memories are having their own problems; one of them is trying to seduce Clementine himself and while he is off the other loses Joel so must call in his boss which in tern leads to more secrets being exposed.
This is a hard film to describe as much of the action is non-linear and the viewer is deliberately confused about what is happening at any given moment. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are great as Joel and Clementine and other cast members, including Kirsten Dunst and Elijah Wood do well too. While this is clearly science fiction due to the memory erasing it doesn't look like stereotypical sci-fi; everything looks like things in the present day look; even the memory erasing machine looked like medical machinery rather than some futuristic device one might expect. Even if you aren't a fan of Jim Carrey films this is worth checking out; in fact I suspect it is worth watching more than once as it felt like the sort of film that will make more sense on the second viewing!