Like giving cotton candy to a starving person

Rating: 1/10 (5 January 2006)

This isn't really a movie review. It's more a reaction. After watching this movie, I feel like running around screaming, "You're missing the point! You're missing the point!" Perhaps I'm missing the point. The film gets kudos for being clever and quirky and well-filmed, in a Being John Malkovich kind of way. Clever, quirky, but there's a spiritual barrenness underlying it. Shouldn't art be more than clever? Shouldn't it reach deeper? Limericks are clever  we don't call them art. The underlying message in Eternal Sunshine isn't all that original. I am tired of seeing movies about love and loneliness. How many movies have we all seen whose basic point is that if you just reach out, take a chance, find romance, this will fend off the ravening wolves of loneliness at the door of modern life?
In a culture that desperately needs a sense of community and connection, peddling movies and songs about romance is like giving cotton candy to a starving person.
It isn't what we need! Finding romance is not the way to fend off loneliness and alienation, a change in the culture is. If we all felt connected to something that mattered, to other living things, to communities we cared about, romances wouldn't be the be-all and end-all of meaningful existence, it would be just one among many of life's joys.