Nice try, but!

Rating: 5/10 (22 January 2005)

It is incredible with how boring a film one can achieve the notion of great cinema. "Eternal Sunshine" lacks originality, inspiration and cinematic inventiveness.
We observe a couple, Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, admittedly great actors, who find the "true love". Or at least something like this. The beginning promises an enchanted film: Carrey, a pretty ordinary guy, standing on the platform waiting for his commuter train, decides spontaneously to take a day off and go to the beach. There a girl, Kate Winslet, introduces herself to him and they spend the day together. After the introductory credits, he meets her again and she does not seem to know her. Then we get to know the story how she had him erased from her memory and he decides to do likewise.
As the erasing is being done, the technician, just the perfect nerd, is having a little party with his girlfriend and the erasing gets out of hand. At the same time, we see the scenes from his life with Kate Winslet, which are being erased. Carrey decides to keep the memories and so he imagines her in his childhood, so that the technicians can find her. These episodes are just a series of pretty conventional episodes of a love story as we have seen it hundreds of times. And the imagined scenes of Kate Winslet in Carreys childhood lack any originality besides funny images of a big Jim Carrey, the size of the small Jim Carrey under his mother's kitchen table, which is not exactly a revolution (just compare the fantasy scenes in Carax "Les amants de Pont Neuf", to name just one example of more than ten years ago).
It is pretty soon in the movie that we understand, that the scene at the beginning was an episode that has taken place after the two had their memories erased and meet again. Thus we never lose track of what is happening (which would have been interesting in a film about a loss of memory or "virtual reality" - compare for example David Fincher "The Game").
Eventually, with the two back together, or at least the possibility of this, we learn, that true love is a sentiment beyond particular memories. We had already guessed. And we know that erasing memories is cruel. Yeap, that's true!
There are a number of interesting ideas and string scenes, for example when one of the technicians takes on the role of Carrey and cites lines he has stolen from his belongings, in trying to approach Winslet, but all of this is just not enough to carry the whole film.
This movie has about the narrative quality of a mediocre video clip. And because his director has done video clips, we might have at least expected some visual creativity. But, helas, nothing. A hand camera is all we get, yet we never understand why. The film has a basic disposition of a classic movie, with the additional ingredient of 5% MTV. "It might be an avantgarde movie, and even if it has none of its qualities, it shows all its defects", says the critic in Fellinis 8 1/2 and it seems that he has give a description of this film.