The best thing about it is the title

Rating: 3/10 (17 July 2009)

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is a film which could, just, have worked. It is based around a science fiction concept which is the precise opposite of the one which forms the basis of "Total Recall". That film posits that that at some time in the future neuro-technology will have advanced to the point where it is possible to implant false memories into a person's brain- that is to say memories which the person believes to be genuine but which in fact relate to events that have never taken place. "Eternal Sunshine..", by contrast, explores the possibility that it might be possible to use neuro-technology to remove unwanted memories from a person's brain. Unlike "Total Recall", which is explicitly set several centuries in the future, it seems to be set in the present day; the fictional technique of "Targeted Memory Erasure" is the only futuristic thing about it.
The film tells the story of two lovers, Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski who meet, fall in love, fall out of love again and separate. When Joel seeks out Clementine to try for a reconciliation, he finds that she has no memories of him and discovers that she has used the services of a firm called Lacuna, Inc to erase all memories of him from her mind. On the basis that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander, Joel decides that he will also have his mind wiped of all memory of Clementine and makes an appointment with Lacuna. During the mind wiping procedure, however, he decides that he wants to remember Clementine after all.
This was a film which came as a great disappointment to me. Kirsten Dunst may have a fine nose for mediocrity, but its other stars have all starred in some of the finest films of recent years, Kate Winslet in "Heavenly Creatures" and Branagh's "Hamlet", Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show", Tom Wilkinson in "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "Valhalla", and Elijah Wood in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Winslet, admittedly, is an actress I am never quite sure about. It may seem unpatriotic to say so, given her current status of National Treasure Grade One in Britain, but her acting veers between the brilliant, as in "Heavenly Creatures" or the recent "Revolutionary Road", the good ("Sense and Sensibility"), the average ("Titanic", "Iris"), the technically proficient but soulless ("The Reader"), and the frankly weird ("Hideous Kinky"). Her performance here falls firmly into the final category, (although "Eternal Sunshine.." is a far weirder film than "Hideous Kinky" ever knew how to be). Her Clementine comes across as so emotionally dysfunctional (polite euphemism for bitch) that it is easy to understand just why Joel wanted every trace of her eradicated from his memory. What is more difficult to understand is why he changed his mind about the process or, indeed, fell in love with her in the first place. Jim Carrey can also be brilliant, as he was in "The Truman Show", but falls a long way short of repeating that triumph here, with his Joel coming across as just dull.
The film seems to have plenty of admirers, currently being ranked at No. 62 on the IMDb Top 250 and having been nominated for all sorts of awards. I realise, therefore, that I am in a minority when I say that I disliked it. Part of the problem was that it is a romantic comedy (of sorts) where I was unable to sympathise with either of the principal characters, but the main reason for my dislike was that Michel Gondry's tricksy direction made the plot so difficult- at times impossible- to follow. "Eternal Sunshine" has been compared to "Being John Malkovich", the script for which was written by the same writer, Charlie Kaufman, but I found that film much clearer to understand.
Gondry, particularly during the sequences where Joel's memory is being wiped, uses a number of disorientating techniques such as distorted perspective and an extreme form of non-linear narrative. The film jumps suddenly from Joel's memories, some recent, some of the more distant past, to scenes set in the present, which makes it very difficult to piece together exactly what is going on. The effect has been described as "surrealistic", but I have always found Surrealism to be something which works better on canvas, as in the works of Salvador Dali and Giorgio de Chirico, than it does on the cinema screen, except in small doses, an example being the dream sequence Dali designed for Hitchcock's "Spellbound". The best thing about "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is its quirky title- a line from Alexander Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard". 3/10