Michel Gondry’s memory-erasing romance is inventive, funny and painfully convincing about why people hurt one another. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet make its complications worth following, though the visual tricks occasionally crowd them out.
Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind makes a convincing romance out of the wish to forget one. Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay takes memory erasure seriously enough to ask what it would feel like, without getting bogged down in how the machinery might work. We recommend it warmly, with a warning that the storytelling sometimes makes an already painful relationship needlessly difficult to follow. Its strongest reason for existing is Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, who give the cleverness two people worth caring about.
Carrey plays Joel Barish with a reserve that makes rejection seem almost physically embarrassing. When Joel learns that Winslet’s Clementine Kruczynski has erased him from her memory, the science-fiction premise becomes a particularly cruel version of being told to go away. We were hurt by that discovery, because Carrey lets Joel seem small and unprepared rather than grandly tragic. There is no need to share his circumstances to recognise the humiliation of finding that someone has finished with us more thoroughly than we imagined.
Their meeting on a train is a useful measure of what Winslet contributes: the attraction has to work before any complicated account of memory can matter. She gives Clementine enough confidence to make Joel’s reserve interesting, drawing our attention to what he struggles to express. We can understand why these two people would want to know one another, while still wondering how comfortable they would be together. Kaufman’s writing lets affection and irritation belong to the same relationship, and neither actor tries to tidy that up.
Ellen Kuras’s cinematography makes the meeting on the train feel intimate, giving us a reason to care before the visual complications take over. Dan Leigh’s production design gives the couple a world that feels comfortably ordinary, which helps the memory-erasure imagery unsettle us. Gondry’s effects work best when they make us worry about what Joel is losing. The familiarity matters: we need to believe these people have spent time together before the prospect of forgetting it can hurt.
Valdís Óskarsdóttir’s editing has the difficult job of making disorientation bearable, and mostly succeeds. Even when we cannot immediately place a moment, the feeling between Joel and Clementine is clear, while Jon Brion’s score supplies tenderness without making every hurt feel momentous. The trouble comes when another visual disruption arrives before the previous one has had time to register. Gondry can seem reluctant to leave a clever idea alone, and there are stretches where we would gladly trade another flourish for a little breathing space.
Kaufman also questions the familiar romantic promise that finding the right person will settle everything. Joel and Clementine make a less reassuring prospect, because their attraction does not make either of them easier company. This gives Carrey and Winslet something more interesting to play than a contest over who deserves our sympathy. Across its 108 minutes, the film allows us to care about both of them without requiring us to excuse everything they do.
Choose it for a night when both of you are willing to pay attention. A distracted viewing will make the structural fuss more irritating and the performances easier to miss. Leave the argument about which of them is being unreasonable until afterwards.
