Brilliant film and Carrey's best work...

Rating: 10/10 (19 April 2005)

It's not often a movie comes a long that is so good it makes you completely forget that the entire premise of the film is utterly impossible. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of those movies. Jim Carrey stars as Joel Barish, a fumbling, socially incompetent man who learns that his girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has had him erased from her memory.
In an attempt to even the score and to settle his own demons, Joel undergoes the same procedure to erase memories of Clementine from his head. Director Michel Gondry takes us backward through Joel's mind as each individual memory is erased. What follows is an extraordinary lesson about love, loss and the value of our memories.
In Eternal Sunshine, Carrey gives the most inspired performance of his career. While he has turned in standout performances in Man on the Moon and The Truman Show, Eternal Sunshine shows his full range as a dramatic actor. Kate Winslet sheds her familiar British accent and fully transforms herself in playing the complex role of Clementine, a needy alcoholic who always seems to get bored with her men.
The movie's non-linear style is a clever way to tell the story. It's not always evident where the characters are in time. Subtle details, such as the color of Clementine's hair in a particular scene, are used to identify the point in time to the viewer.
The casting in Eternal Sunshine served as one of its strongest suits. Carrey and Winslet are joined by youngsters Kirsten Dunst and Elijah Wood as assistants for Lacuna Incorporated, the company erasing Joel's memory. All four characters have their own sense of immaturity, but the balance between the subtle immaturity of Carrey and Winslet's characters and the blatant, expressive immaturity of Dunst and Wood's characters adds another layer of context to a very deep, emotional film.
On February 27, Charlie Kaufman was honored with an Oscar for best original screenplay for Eternal Sunshine. After seeing him lose for several phenomenal films like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, it was nice to see a brave and original writer finally get his due. Without a doubt, Eternal Sunshine is clearly Kaufman's most ambitious project to date.