Film review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Continuing the run of Charlie Kaufman screenplays, we have this one, which is not a laugh-out-louder, and is significantly less cynical than Malkovich.  In fact, it’s rather sweet and almost hopeful (with some gut punches along the way).  The film begins with Joel, played by Jim Carrey (who is in his subdued, Truman Show period, and already looks much older than the Mask-era antic mugger) waking up in a bad mood on Valentine ’s Day 2004.  He finds his car has a huge dent in the side, which he attributes to the car parked next to him, on whose windscreen he leaves a sarcastic “Thanks!” note.  (We later discover the real cause of that dent.)  He drives to the train station and is about to take his usual train to work when, on a sudden (and, he admits, uncharacteristic) impulse, he switches tracks at a run and jumps on the train to Montauk, and walks the freezing, February beach.  Another person is also on the beach, a woman, but as he says in the voice over, he can’t even meet the eyes of a woman he doesn’t know.  (This might be a clue, because after she introduces herself to him later, he seems to be able to look at her.)  She is Clementine, a wild free spirit who currently has hair colored “Blue Ruin” (as she informs a painfully tongue-tied Joel on the train) but who will have several different colors throughout the film.  She’s played by Kate Winslet, who is one of two Brits attempting American accents in this film.  There follows a whirlwind romance, aided by a midnight picnic out on the ice, and things seem to be going well when, after Joel offers to drop Clementine off at her home, she asks if she can come and sleep at his house.  As she goes inside to get a toothbrush, Joel has a strange encounter with Frodo (oh, okay, Elijah Wood, but let’s face it, he’ll be Frodo the rest of his career.  And actually, that’s one of the problems I have with this film: everybody is a familiar face.  I think the screenplay would have been better served by a cast of unknowns, as then we wouldn’t be saying “oh, hey, David Cross is in this too!” when we should be focusing on the plot) who taps on the window of Joel’s car and asks him if he can help him.  And then, all of a sudden, Joel is in his (undented) car, bawling his eyes out, and the credits are rolling (about 20 minutes in).  We will return to that first segment in the third act of the movie, and learn that that wasn’t the first time Joel and Clementine (and Elijah Wood) have met.  Because the main concept of the film is that there is a service, called Lacuna Inc., which will delete all the memories of your ex to enable you to get over a painful relationship.  And Joel (a few days younger Joel) soon discovers that Clementine has had him wiped from her mind, so he decides to do the same for her.  The director of this film (the French director Michel Gondry), like Spike Jonze in Malkovich, had previously only done videos (actually I checked this, and he had done another film, in fact another Charlie Kaufman penned film, but it was the not-very-good Human Nature) and commercials, and the film has a remarkably similar aesthetic (although, where the lighting in Malkovich seemed warm and yellow, this seems colder).  Lacuna Inc., far from being an ultra-modern, gleaming white affair, instead looks like a scruffy office from the 70s, with lots of old-fashioned files and things recorded on tapes rather than straight to a computer file.  (Gondry has displayed a similar affection for lo-tech, analogue equipment in his subsequent films, most notably Be Kind Rewind.)  The procedure requires you to have your brain scanned while they (Tom Wilkinson and Mark Ruffalo) show you items that you’ve collected that remind you of the offending person in your past so that they can get a map of where all the memories are.  Then you go home, take a knockout pill and they come over and set up their equipment and go about the process of deleting the memories.  (At first we wondered about this, but it makes sense, because then you can wake up in your own bed and go on about your life without being confused about why you’re in a strange doctor’s office – because, of course, they also delete your memory of having your memories deleted, otherwise you’d instantly investigate who you had deleted from your memory.  And, of course, we discover that our first sight of Joel waking up at the opening of the film was him waking up from the procedure.)  The bulk of the film actually happens as Joel is lying in his own bed having his memories deleted.  We get to know the employees of Lacuna, including the secretary (Kirsten Dunst) who has a crush on Dr. Mierswiak (Wilkinson) who invented the procedure.  Meanwhile, we also see Joel running around his subconscious trying to escape the procedure as Clementine disappears from memory after memory.  They try to hid somewhere off the map that Lacuna has made, such as in his childhood memories (so Jim Carrey becomes tiny and Kate Winslet becomes one of his mother’s friends, in a period outfit that Clementine covets) or in his humiliations.  None of this works, however, but Clementine whispers “meet me in Montauk” before her last iteration gets deleted.  Thus we return to the beginning of the movie, knowing why Joel was motivated to jump train platforms.  However, it is also revealed that Kirsten Dunst’s character has had a previous relationship with Dr. Mierswiak and he persuaded her to undergo the procedure (because his wife was not happy at the affair).  She is devastated, and decides that Lacuna is actually immoral, and removes crates of the files of every Lacuna customer and personally delivers each one to their address.  So when Clementine comes in to get her toothbrush, she discovers her file and a tape which she plays in Joel’s car, only to hear her own voice listing how awful he is.  Joel is freaked out and thinks she’s mocking him, and they fight and separate.  Meanwhile he returns to find his own tape.  Will their relationship survive?  Should it?

This film is often cited as a useful illustration of memory theories of personal identity, which is why I selected it, but I think that’s actually a side issue.  It made me think of couples who have each previously divorced and enter their relationship more ready to make compromises and cut the other slack.  Only in this case Joel and Clementine’s previous partner was the other.  But their relationship begins with listening to each person recount the worst features of the other, so it is a relationship built on acceptance and realism, and likely to be stronger.  In their instance, Lacuna has enabled them, in effect, to time-travel and re-do their relationship, better this time.  Is it wishful thinking?  Sort of, but it’s actually less so than most romances, and we feel more hopeful for Joel and Clementine than for couples who don’t know what they’re in for.  It’s the opposite of the ending of The Graduate.  An uncharacteristically hopeful script from Charlie Kaufman?  Well, judging by his subsequent films, it didn’t take.
(Oh: and the title is from Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope - a nice link with Craig’s puppet show in Malkovich.)