Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

my rating:

Nathan had to see Angelina Jolie in Taking Lives the week that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out, plus it looked too "weird" for him. I just got around to seeing it solo. Sure, it had some weird moments, but I was more surprised by how fairly "ordinary" it was. Not in a bad way, but it wasn't as surreal as I expected.

The story is basically: boy (Jim Carrey) meets girl (Kate Winslet), boy and girl fall in and out of love, boy finds out girl has had him erased from her memories, he decides to erase her... but then changes his mind as he relives those memories and tries to protect "her" from the erasing process.

Those scenes are where the surreality comes into play. For example, we get our first warning that Carrey's memory of the event is being erased as background details start quietly disappearing, such as the lettering on signs or the faces of by-standers. Eventually she's gone altogether and the environment itself collapses into nothingness. This was very nicely done.

A couple of his attempts to squirrel the memory of her away elsewhere in his mind give Carrey an opportunity to chew the scenery with his trademark over-the-top childishness, but most of the time he's nicely understated, and likeable as a kind of awkward, lonely, and mostly-unhappy schmoe. Until Winslet - a flaky, impulsive force of chaos - came into his life, for both good and ill. Which reminded me a bit of me and Andy. As aggravating as each of us was to the other at times, we complemented each other well, and were "good for" each other.

The "moral" of the story is pretty obvious: that even when relationships go sour, there's still a preciousness to the memory of the relationship, especially when it was still going well. That's something I can relate to, and agree with. As painful as it was to lose Andy the way I did, and as tempting as it might be to wish I could just forget about him, ultimately I really wouldn't want that. Cause darn it, it is better to have loved and lost. And if it weren't for those memories, I wouldn't be the person I am today... more depressive, but still with a better sense of perspective and balance about myself.

The technique used in the film is complete and under nonsense, but that's forgiveable because it's really more of a fantasy than a science fiction film to begin with. They just used gadgets and a little psychotechnobabble to justify the allegory, rather than pixy dust and moonbeams.

In addition to a small trend of movies dealing with memory, there's been a rash of films using out-of-order storytelling, and this is one of them. It shows us the progression of their relationship from end to beginning, as his most recent memories of her are erased first, and he falls back to earlier and earlier memories to defend. There's also some trickiness with order-juggling, deliberately intended to throw the audience off track. It's a bit confusing, and I'm glad I didn't drag Nathan to see it, because it would have put him off. But it works pretty well.

The ongoing subplots featuring the staff at the slightly-shady institute that does the memory erasing were arguably necessary to the overall story (providing the hook to hang the semi-sweet Hollywood ending on), and provided some sometimes-comic relief from All Carrey & Winslet All The Time, but they introduced some secondary complications to the whole issue of memory erasure that kind of detracted from the main story. I would've liked to see that dealt with more... or not at all.