Retro Review | “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”: Michel Gondry’s Crazy Sci Fi Rom Com still holds up
So, Jim Carrey making a fool of himself in a mildly creepy way worshiping Emma Stone, or hamming it up in the “Sonic” movies. So Kate Winslet in the OK, but IMHO not great “The Regime” on Amazon Prime Video, although her Max murder mystery series was fantastic.
We’ll always have “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”.
Great Films Stay Great
There is a more formal Prompt that many good reviewers on Medium follow, along the lines of “(Film Name), twenty years on” or something like that. Since Michel Gondry’s remarkable SciFi Rom Com has been out for exactly twenty years this year, a while, I might do that.
Or I might not.
I might just say, as I often do, I recently re-visited one of my favorite films of all time to see if it still holds up. I love ESotSM so much that I name checked it on my X/Twitter profile page — back when I joined, and Twitter wasn’t the toxic behemoth that it has become today.
Also, if you read me you know I am going back and re-watching content if it is now available in a higher resolution format than it was when I first saw it. For example, and I think I am right about this, the version of ESotSM I watched many years ago on a Streaming Service might have been in SD (480i or 480p, so-called DVD-quality). At least I had it bookmarked and when I started watching it, it looked a bit fuzzy, so I did a new search on Amazon Prime Video and found an HD version.
Yeah, I go full film-tech-geek on this stuff.
And now, back to our Film
Sorry, but I do often get distracted by topics that have nothing to do with my recommendation either to, or to not, watch a film. Please, though, definitely watch ESotSM. And watch it in HD (or wait until it hopefully comes out in 4K at some point) if possible.
Why?
Well, because Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Despite the long and winding road of his film career (“Mr. Popper’s Penguins” much?), Carrey is known to many of us as being a fine dramatic actor, as his turn in Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show” demonstrated. We don’t need to be convinced about Winslet who is quite simply one of the finest actresses of her generation.
Together they are sensational.
In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” Carrey plays Joel, and Winslet Clementine, two somewhat lost souls who randomly meet on a commuter train going to, or coming from, a train stop in Long Island. And seem to fall instantly in love.
Or do they?
Elliptical Narratives Unite
You see, one thing I noticed this time watching Gondry’s masterpiece is that, and I promise this is not a spoiler, when Joel and Clementine meet on the train, they have already been in a relationship, broken up, and had their memories of one another erased. So, although we start at the beginning of what is a presumably a new narrative timeline, it is really a loop.
Yeah, that’s Gondry for ya.
The central conceit of ESotSM, and what makes it far more interesting than a conventional Rom Com is that there exists in Gondry’s wonderful made- up world a technology that can erase painful memories so the individual doesn’t have to continue to suffer. And even more wonderful, the mad scientist who runs the marvelously named Lacuna Corporation is played by the late Tom Wilkinson (sniff), who here shows that he was as adept at Comic acting as he showed many times he was at dramatic acting (“Michael Clayton” much?.
Joel and Clementine go along the serpentine road of Love, stopping in cool second-hand stores along the way to acquire quirky totems of their affection for one another (which will play a key role in the story later), and, at one point, doing snow angels on a creaky lake in winter, that might just collapse and drown them.
Love is, in fact, a Risk
Not that Gondry is going for metaphor, here, but what this iconic scene (featured in nearly all of the one sheets for the film) shows is that Love is marvelous, but also maddening. And can be very risky. The main risk being that those who fall deeply, madly in love can just as easily fall out of it.
Which, in fact happens to Joel and Clementine, which then introduces the “Deus Ex Machina” of the film in the second reel. The need to erase said memories, formerly wonderful but now bitterly painful as they remind each one of them of what they lost when they had to break up.
Enter Wilkinson and his band of merry Lacuna pranksters, played with true verve by Mark Ruffalo (Stan), Kirsten Dunst (Mary)and Elijah Wood (Patrick). Post breakup, Joel randomly (or not?) discovers a card from Lacuna and becomes curious. Little does he know (and again, not a spoiler) that Clementine has already visited Lacuna and already had her memories of Joel erased.
Now we get to the fun part
This sets up one of the funniest set pieces you will ever see in a film. The Lacuna, ahem, technicians arrive at Joel’s apartment to administer the memory-erasing technique. By the way, none of this is even remotely believable, and Gondry’s production designer kind of purposely phones it in by creating a strange, “Twelve Monkeys” style tech that probably would only succeed in erasing magnetic tapes, let alone human memories.
The believability is not even antithetical (maybe orthogonal) to the point of Charlie Kaufmann’s wonderful script.
There is a lot else going on in this scene, and while Stan administers the tech to a sleeping Joel, Patrick and Mary get drunk and stoned, and end up dancing on the bed while listening to music. Later, when a glitch occurs in the process, Wilkinson’s Dr. Howard Meirzwiak has to arrive to fix it, and Mary, drunk, professes her undying love for him.
The scene is so sweet, yet made so heart-breaking when Mary quotes lines from English Poet Alexander Pope, “the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind…”, yet mistakenly refers to him as Pope Alexander. Effectively ruining any chance she might have of having Love, herself.
What a Shooting Script this must have been
Any who, the attempt to erase Joel’s memories, and his desperate effort to prevent them from being erased, ushers in the Third Reel of this marvelous film. Here, apparently inside of Joel’s mind, Joel and Clementine work very hard to prevent Joel’s memories from being destroyed while, in the main narrative the Lacuna folks are working just as hard to erase them.
One other twist that occurs is that, in order to have memories erased, it is necessary to have an item from their time together (the afore-mentioned Totem) available to help the patient latch on to the memories. Patrick, who has fallen for Clementine during her memory-erasing of Joel, has kept the items that Clementine nominated, and is using them to try to get Clem to fall in love with him.
I’m not sure how much of this weirdness is the Charlie Kaufmann script, and how much is Gondry’s direction. I did learn from reading the IMDB “Trivia” that Gondry shot most of this last part of the film using two Cameras with two Camera Operators, each of whom had an earphone into which Gondry could speak and give direction.
I won’t spoil the last twenty minutes or so of the film, except to say, when you watch it, marvel at the fact that Gondry used nearly no CGI to create the amazing visual effects of Joel’s memories being erased.
And, as I said previously, the film ends where it begin, on that train on Long Island.
Available on many streaming platforms. I purchased the HD version (also available for rent) on Amazon Prime Video.
