Eternal nightmare

Rating: Null/10 (8 May 2004)

(contains spoilers)
I expected this movie to be a romantic comedy where two people get their memories of a love affair turned sour erased and then re-discover each other. While this movie had some elements of that in it, the majority of the movie was taken up in the nightmarish world of Jim Carrey's unconscious mind as his memories of his lover were being erased.
The premise of the movie was good, but the setting served to alienate in a way that I'm not sure was intended. The cold, wet, drab New York-area citiescape and a seedy medical clinic staffed by negligent techies who would get stoned while treating an unconscious patient gave a disturbing overtone that the viewer had to wrestle with.
Too much time was spent in the dreamland sequences where Carrey's memory was being eradicated, as he was re-living the events with his lover while the conversations of the techies and the memory erasing preparations were simulataneously going on, both in separate scenes and blended with the memories being re-lived and erased. In that sense it was an interesting cinemegraphic storytelling technique, although it took a while to realize this is what was happening and not just some nightmare of the unconscious patient. Those scenes took up too much of the movie.
That sci-fi kind of premise was interesting and had a little surprise or two. But before this movie was over I was thinking how it could have been done differently, for example in a groundhog-day re-living of events and having Carrey stand up for himself against the impulsive and abusive girlfriend (which begged to be done throughout the movie), or some other variation that one could imagine with memory-erasing technology such as one partner having control over what was erased in the other partner, selective memory erasure, or other variations that might be more interesting.
Paradoxically Carrey and his girlfriend, in the space of his mind during the all-night erasure session, decide to evade the erasure by 'hiding' in various memories, which provides some entertaining sequences. But in the end they apparently go back together, at least in dreamland, which gives the lesson that it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Still, the scenes were confusing, nightmarish and there never was much light at the end of the storeytelling tunnel. There seemed to be alternate versions of lives that were revisited in the memory erasure process that never made sense. The 'normal' scenes, the believable workaday life of the clinic, etc. were well-done, technically believable, realistically and well-acted, but this movie had a never-ending darkness to it. I'm not sure there was one sunny day in the movie (which is how the northeast is, admittedly) but it could have been cheered up or had the nightmare of the memory evasion contrasted with a cleaner, brighter 'real' world, or given a more understandable and happy ending, or made you think more about the possibilities of the technology like Star Trek would have done for example. There was nothing happy in this movie--in the characters, events, setting or the ending. An interesting acting sidetrack for Carrey as a 'nice guy' but the movie itself was just too interminably unpleasant for no good reason. 3 out of 10.