An experience for the spirit and the soul

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2015)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's mystifying and sometimes downright confusing premise, due to the fact that it transcends reality and largely exists in the mind of a man, who is actively pursuing his unconscious to preserve dreams and memories, is levied by how incredibly honest its emotions and romantic notions can get at times. Even in its darkest, saddest moments, this is a thoroughly beautiful film, emotionally potent all around, exacting every emotion your system can handle almost with complete impunity to your senses. It's an uncommon film that, even when it's perplexing, still makes you grateful you're not watching a basic, linear romance drama.
The film opens with Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey), a disconnected and unhappy soul, who impulsively ditches work one day and meets Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) on a train. Clementine is the exact opposite of Joel, free-spirited and frequently spacey, unfazed by a great deal of contrivances many get hung up on in their lives. We see their relationship span the course of two years before it ends in a fairly ugly fight, with Joel utterly baffled that one day, when he goes to meet and make up with Clementine, she has no recollection of who he is. Clementine had hired the services employed by a company called Lacuna, Inc., a corporation that specialized in erasing the memories of someone or something by completely white-washing the brain and making the subject forget any and everything related to said person or event.
When Joel discovers this, he is loaded with questions that bear confidential answers; Clementine doesn't remember him and that's killing him, for he has no idea as to what her motivations or present feelings were. He has no other ideas besides to effectively wipe his own memory, reaching out to neurologist Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) to take advantage of his services. The memory-erasing crew consists of Stan (Mark Ruffalo), Patrick (Elijah Wood), and Mary (Kirsten Dunst), all of whom are taking care of Joel during his operation and bearing their own individual secrets attached to the project that come to light during the operation. It isn't until halfway through the operation, as Joel is having more-or-less an out of body experience, seeing Clementine disappear from his memories as he relives every moment he ever spent with her, that he realizes he doesn't want to go through with the operation. Within every memory, Joel tries as hard as he can to preserve Clementine's presence, even if that means taking him to some unknown part of his unconscious or into a memory where she was never personally present.
Writer Charlie Kaufman creates a story so grounded in fantasy, yet simultaneously so devoted to showing it in a realistic manner, that the balancing act the film manages to pull off is quite remarkable to say the least. If minds could be erased and people, events, or traumatic experiences could be wiped away from our collective conscious and unconscious, then the methods would likely look a lot like how they're portrayed in Eternal Sunshine. Consider the visual scheme employed by cinematographer Ellen Kuras, a frequent collaborator of not only director Michael Gondry but Spike Lee, which emphasizes dreamlike beauty and subtle color schemes. Look at the way Clementine's hair changes color with her mood; when she's frightened and vulnerable, her hair is blue, and when she is content and so happy she could die, her hair is a light, relaxing shade of lime green. On top of that, the visual scheme employed in the sequences involving the past memories both Joel and Clementine experienced are almost soothing in the way they are captured and lit, evoking a rare sense of romanticized innocence.
Eternal Sunshine's biggest issue, however, is its organization, which never allows us to get too comfortable or too immersed into any particular situation. I would've loved an entire film set inside the mind of Joel as it's being wiped free of anything related to Clementine, but Kaufman's distractions, in the form of the memory-erasers and their stories, provide for an annoying disruption to the intimacy and emotional resonance that takes so long to build from Joel and Clementine. By the time the film has that and has us totally wrapped up in these characters, it jumps back and forth between those actively erasing Joel's memory and the mind being erased, burdening an already difficult film to follow with more excess.
Nonetheless, there's a beauty in the natural flow of emotions, and the simultaneous romance and sadness elements Kaufman employs here. It's difficult to make one feel touched and consumed by the love of a film's characters, yet sad and glum about the inevitable results of their actions and the happenings on screen, but Kaufman remarkably does it. The emotional roller-coaster Eternal Sunshine takes you on, never allowing you to cling to one emotion for too long, is remarkable from a screen writing standpoint, and a true work of beauty that needs to be cherished. Throw in strong central performances, particularly from Carrey, who handles the role of melancholy and lovestruck well, intertwining them with a sense of rare symmetry, and you have a pleasantly complex film that caters to the spirit and the soul.
Starring: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson, and David Cross. Directed by: Michael Gondry.