Meet cute. It’s Valentine’s Day. On a whim, New Yorker Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) ditches his commute to work, instead calling in sick and taking the train through a frigid landscape to Montauk. He walks along the beach, stops in a diner, queues up on the platform for the train back home. At every place, he spies a young woman in orange jumper with blue hair. His eyes follow her, but he is too withdrawn to approach her.
On the train, she’s there. Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) switches seats, getting closer each time, starting a conversation. He drives her home. She invites him in for drinks. He goes in. They’re clicking, but nothing happens. He says he must go, but takes her number. At home, he can barely wait to call her.
Next night, they’re out together for a midnight picnic on frozen Charles River. Talking, laughing, being goofy. It’s magical. Next morning, he drives her home. She’s tired, wants to sleep at his place. She goes in to get her toothbrush.
What’s next?
Eighteen minutes into this story, it’s time for the opening credits.
If you’ve read the one-line synopsis on the streaming and review sites, you already know enough to have questions. Best not, on first viewing, to get too hung up on timelines. If understanding what comes first and what comes next is your thing, you can do that on a second or third or eighth viewing. First time through, just sit back and take it all as it happens.
But, OK, let’s briefly cover what is universally known about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Early after the credits roll, Joel receives a postcard from a firm called Lacuna, informing him that Clementine has had her memories of him erased, and he should avoid future contact with her. On his fact-finding mission to Lacuna, Joel meets the star-studded staff: Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), the inventor of the procedure; his chief assistant, Stan Fink (Mark Ruffalo); a gofer, Patrick Wertz (Elijah Wood); and Mary Svevo (Kirsten Dunst), the receptionist.
And what does he do? Joel decides to have the same procedure, since he can’t imagine a life without Clementine.
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind belongs to a genre known as speculative fiction, not science fiction. It’s not concerned with the deep mechanics behind the memory-wiping MacGuffin. It’s asking us to conjecture, to consider a simple, fundamental question: if we could scrub our brains clean of painful memories, would we be any happier?
I wish I could like Eternal Sunshine better than I do. Carrey and Winslet are so fine as the oil-and-water couple who shouldn’t mix, but somehow do … until they don’t. I’d watch a movie just about these two loons. I was even all-in on the memory-wiping premise and the many fine scenes of Carrey riffling through and tearing out pages from the sketchbook of his memory. So many brilliant camera techniques. Joel walking out of a memory, lights in the room shutting behind him, emerging into his friend’s living room. Joel trying to hang onto a memory of Clementine, only for her to be pulled away into the darkness, like a victim in a horror movie.
But it lost me in the spectacle of the Lacuna crew performing the wiping procedure at Joel’s apartment. Stan and Mary raid the liquor cabinet, get tipsy and high, peel down to their undies, and dance on Joel’s bed. Just when it can’t get more annoying, the good doctor shows up and there’s even more infuriating emotional complications.
If this were straight-up drama, their behavior would of course be irresponsible. If it were dark comedy, it might even evoke a grin. But this tale belongs to Joel and Clementine, whom I do care about. So when the Lacuna crew’s own foibles, missteps, and outright stupidity take center stage, it was beyond off-putting. I just wanted to yell, “Stop! Stop! I didn’t care about you guys to begin with, and I care even less about you now.”
Eternal Sunshine is the type of movie I recommend not because I like it, but because I think most everyone else will. I even begrudgingly give it a good score, particularly for Charlie Kaufman’s script and Carrey and Winslet’s charismatic performances. I’ll probably like it better on the second or eighth viewing, but for now the off-putting scenes drag down the charm. If I could just have the Lacuna crew wiped from my memory, I’d have liked Eternal Sunshine much better. I think.