Would You Erase Your Mind to Kill the Heart?

Rating: 10/10 (22 April 2005)

That is the question underlying this entire movie, since two-thirds of it is the process of elimination of a man's memories in order to forget the person who caused him some hurt in the recent past.
This man is Joel Parish, played (or underplayed) by Jim Carrey who on a train ride to Long Island meets Clementine Krucyzinski (Kate Winslet). Both strike up an uneasy conversation: she being brash, aggressive, he being almost demure. There seems to be something there lingering between them, some connection even when they're totally different, and later we learn, when their affair ends, that she has decided to erase her memories of him and move on, which prompts Joel to do the same.
Except he decides he doesn't want to at the last minute.
So begins a roller-coaster ride where he tries to salvage anything he can as one by one his memories are being zapped away from him, and to see how he goes from one to the other, often with the surreal assistance of Winslet herself (as she is an integral part of his memories), we definitely get bombarded with frenetic images of Joel's mind literally coming apart at the seams, but we never forget that this is his heart that we're talking about, and in a small performance, Kirsten Dunst reveals just how heartless the procedure can be in a revelatory moment, one that makes us totally root for this odd couple right down to the last scene. One of the most original stories which hit theatres in 2004 and which deservedly won its Best Original Screenplay Oscar even if it lost in acting categories, this is the Movie of 2004.