Ever been plagued by the mistakes of your past? Do you ever wish you’d never met someone who you loved and lost? Ever dream that your regrets could be washed away at the push of a button?
Dr. Howard Mierzwiak and his team of skilled technicians at Lacuna Inc. can put your addled mind to rest. They’ve created and mastered a medical procedure that can pinpoint and eradicate destructive memories.
That’s what Clementine does to forget her ex-boyfriend Joel. Driven by heartbreak and revenge, Joel also applies for the procedure.
But something happens in the middle of the memory wipe that makes Joel reconsider. As he reviews and relives his relationship with Clementine, he realizes that the good times they shared were more important than the bad times. And so Joel tries to fight the process from the inside, scrambling through memory after memory in a desperate attempt to hold onto the memories Mierzwiak is so efficiently zapping away. As the process gets closer to its goal, Joel will try cramming memories of Clementine into any head space he can find, even in buried recollections of childhood traumas and adolescent embarrassments.
Meanwhile, in the world outside Joel’s busy cranium, the team at Lacuna is undergoing its own relationship issues. Lonely clerk Mary (a wonderful Kirsten Dunst) is dating techie Stan, but she harbors a deep unrequited crush on Dr. Merzwiak (the always-great Tom Wilkinson). With its dense structure, quirky characters and brainy innovations, the script for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” could have only come from the mind of Charlie Kaufman. Once again, Kaufman creates a cinematic world of his own that’s a few hairs shy of fantasy and just close enough to reality to mess with your head until you give in to the experience. Kaufman’s expert rug-pulling and scalding blasts of acid wit are on full display as usual, but it’s what he’s working at beneath the surface that makes this film about memory something truly worth remembering. The central characters and their doomed romance achieve an emotional resonance more profound than any flight of fancy Kaufman has conjured in the past.
All of Kaufman’s screenplays have been about longing and the innate human need for love and acceptance, but this time he aims these questions toward a bittersweet answer. Relationships come and go; for meaning, we have to look inside of ourselves. If Joel loses his memories, he loses his identity.
Not to suggest that “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a plodding examination of an Important Topic scrutinized with Utter Seriousness by Humorless Artists. Far from it. Kaufman would much rather chuckle at the follies of humanity than shed a tear for them.
Jim Carrey delivers his most successful dramatic performance to date as Joel, the average Joe whose straight-laced spinelessness is well matched to the brashness of Kate Winslet’s fiery Clementine. In a nice subversion of expectations, it’s Winslet who has the hyperactive character here, and she invests her role with a fragility that’s as intoxicating as to the audience as it would be to Joel. But she’s also a wild, fickle firecracker of a woman who changes her hair color seemingly every time she has a mood swing (one standout example is titled “Blue Ruin”). As fantastic as she is, though, this is Carrey’s show.
Carrey’s played it straight before with mixed levels of success (“The Truman Show”-hit; “The Majestic”-miss), but you could always feel him straining to make his performances good, aching to be taken seriously with every frown and tear. Not so this time. “Eternal Sunshine” finally lets the man formerly known as Ace Ventura disappear inside an onscreen character for arguably the first time in his career. His performance seems effortless, focused and true. When he underplays a climactic monologue as a memory-conjured beach house crumbles to the sand around him, his straightforward delivery breaks your heart.
Charlie Kaufman ends his original screenplays with new beginnings. In “Being John Malkovich,” Craig will continue to pine away inside a new “ripe vessel.” In “Adaptation,” screenwriter Charlie learned enough from his tragic trip to the Everglades to jumpstart his waning personal life and give him material for a dozen new screenplays. In “Eternal Sunshine,” there’s a new beginning for two of the film’s characters, and there seems to be a new beginning for Kaufman as well.
Since he burst onto the scene in 1999, he’s been American cinema’s foremost neo-realist fabulist, spinning complex yarns as provocative and rewarding as they are frequently disorienting. With his latest big-screen endeavor, he retains the intellectual, arms-length objectivity that made him a household name, but he adds raw emotion and a startling feeling of intimacy that make “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” a head trip that’s all but impossible to forget.