Of Understanding Feelings and Loving Personalities

Rating: 7/10 (18 April 2017)

"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know." Pascal's famous quote exudes a sense of instant obviousness on the irrational aspect of love, love as feeling, love as a bridge between two souls but once you dig deeper in that notion, you realize that it's not much about love being irrational but maybe of love being built on 'fantasy', as a euphemism for lies. We can love someone, this is a sentiment human beings are most capable of, but take love as something other than a feeling, as a contract, a commitment and then the word 'fantasy' takes its full meaning because only through a fantasized version of the other, one can sacrifice his freedom of being true to his and her nature, becoming a fantasy in return.
I'm reading myself and I don't think I'm being clear. I think what Michel Gondry's movie or let's say the script written by Charlie Kauffman, who wrote "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation.", is that the mind of someone is a world by itself, it is made of rational and irrational stuff, lost dreams and hopes, dreams and lost hopes, visions of reality, lies, regrets and more than anything memories, it's not much the memories that shape our individuality but the way we perceive them. By that logic, a relationship between two persons represent a real collision of two worlds, where hearts create bridges that minds have a hard time to cross. There's a moment in the film where Clementine says that she doesn't like what she became in her relationship with Joel, it's quite a powerful statement about the way love interfere with our being, and maybe the mind is the only sphere of freedom one is allowed to keep.
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", the film that finally earned Kauffman a long overdue Oscar, allows us to venture in the mind of Joel Barish, a meek and timid young man played by Jim Carrey and who falls in love with Clementine, a free-spirited girl who feels a strange attraction, maybe a feeling of completion in that sponge of a man who allows her to be true to herself. The non-linear narrative makes us suspect that there might be a 'history' between these two souls, why would they meet during Valentine's Day, in a cold beach in Montauk. The credits come after about a quarter of an hour, when we're taken back in the past and realize that they indeed knew each other and because it didn't end happily, Clementine had registered to a program that allows to erase memories of failed relationships. Joel decides to follow the same program.
And this is only the premise, the 'what if' question that drives the film. Kaufman is quite good in these starting concepts, what if we could live fifteen minutes in someone else's body, what if a film could chronicle the process of its own creation, what if we could erase memories? That's an existential challenge. I guess there are three or four memories that would totally change my personality if I erased them so yes, this is an issue I would strongly relate to, but in the case of "Eternal", the idea is more debatable, because love stories aren't meant to end well, so unless it ended with a crime or a rape, why would someone symbolically kill a person he or she loved. Maybe there's a sort of ego-thing, the idea of having lost your time, the desperation, the unhappiness, or maybe that sight of Carrey crying in his car. Love can make you feel lousy indeed.
So Joel decides to follow the treatment and we see the medical staff operating on his brains and the film features a strange and somewhat comical situation where he's in a comatose state while the young assistants charged of mapping the brain spots featuring memories of Clementine to wipe them out, are having fun, drinking beer or even takes advantage on the situation in a way I wouldn't spoil, but let's say that Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood and Tom Wilkinson being actors and observers of the situation also bring a few insights about the way love works and about the way such a concept would be in fact a remedy worse than the cure itself, they're like the Greek chorus of a tragicomedy whose actions speak so vividly against that memories-erasing concept and you expect it's a matter of time before somewhere Joel feels the need to rebel.
And the two thirds of the film are set in the mind of Joel who realizes while venturing in his memories that there's still something strong going between them, and that's the realistic approach of love, it's never as powerful as in the last memory so the more memories you explore, the more likely it is to awake old passions. What follows is an original cat-and-mouse chase in his labyrinthine mind. To a certain extent, It is a gimmick, I enjoyed it in the sense that it didn't overuse the dreamy concept and featured the kind of stuff I would have expected from "Inception", there were a few surrealistic bits that put Carrey in such situations that undermined the 'seriousness' of his role. He was good but just because he doesn't make grimaces doesn't mean he's pulling a great performance.
There's no love but proof of love, only by seeing things that have been done in the name of love that they realized there was a true love, the ending was handled with poetic perfection, while the film was far from being imperfect. I know it is regarded as one of the best movies of the 2000's, but the plot wasn't as elaborate as Kaufman's usual creations and it's like the non-linear editing and overly long second act tried to make the film more complex than what it was, as if it was ashamed of being a straightforward romance of eighty minutes.