Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Adults Only

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.

– Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

Let’s face it: relationships can be an unpredictable road to trek through. Sometimes, they come with the most ecstatic moments we’d ever experience. But other times, they’d come with the biggest heartbreak we’d wish to avoid. But sometimes, as much as we want to devote ourselves to the positive aspects of a relationship rather than their more cattywampus surprises, we tend to be oblivious to what and who truly matters in our lives. 

So what happens when you attempt to forget about literally everything you experienced in a relationship because of the heartbreak that comes with it?

That’s where Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes in, for it explored that concept in a stunning turn of events.

Which memories are too painful to hold onto? Which memories are too precious to throw away? This film felt equivalent to watching these two opposing ideologies arm wrestle each other. It’s even more stimulating when you see it all occurring within someone’s head. It takes the whole idea of experiencing heartbreak and wishing to forget it into a whole new realm of depth and trippy interweaving of scenarios that only highlight the genuine nature of the relationship in question instead of its catastrophic moments.

To start with the story, Joel Barish and his girlfriend, Clementine Kruczynski, experienced some shifts in their relationships when they gradually got fed up with the follies of each other’s well-being and personalities. In response, they turned to a company called Lacuna to arrange procedures where they would have had their memories of each other wiped out so they wouldn’t have had to deal with the troubles of their relationship ever again. It turns out that Joel got the idea after discovering that Clementine asked Lacuna to wipe her memory of him out first. So you can say part of this was out of the heartbreak that he felt after seeing her go out with another man at a Barnes and Noble bookstore. Yet, other parts of it could also have been played into him wanting to forget about her since she decided to forget about him first, and willingly so. 

While Joel passed out from medications he took, he was being worked on by Lacuna workers Stan Fink, played by Mark Ruffalo, his assistant Patrick Wertz, played by Elijah Wood – and later both Mary Svevo, played by Kirsten Dunst, and Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, played by Tom Wilkinson – as they all went to work on their operation with Joel as he re-experienced every aspect of his life with Clementine before the downward turn of events. However, the longer Joel experienced his memories with Clementine, the sooner he realized that as painful as his downward turns with Clementine had become, it was less ethical to wipe his memory clean of that relationship at all, for there was something about his relationship with Clementine and even with Clementine herself that he thought too dear to let go. So, in a last-ditch effort, Joel negotiated his way through all his memories of Clementine as Lacuna’s brain procedures took hold and tried to hold on to Clementine and his memories of her before they vanished completely from his head. Would Joel have outsmarted Lacuna’s mechanics and held on to the closest thing he had to the love of his life before he no longer knew of it?

At first glance, the idea of watching someone deliberately ask for their memories of a designated person to be wiped clean out was an interesting, if not disheartening, premise for a romantic drama. But the anchors that carried this movie forward were the characters, their decision-making, and the consequences that unfolded for each other. They were each incredibly diverse in their personalities and myriad spontaneous interactions. While some were not written evenly, they still helped leave a distinguished mark whenever they did their thing in the movie, to the point where they left an impact with so little in some circumstances. 

Joel was a regular guy who was more keen on expressing his thoughts either in a journal he kept with him or in the form of various drawings he made of anything and anyone he saw. But since he was more of an internal guy and had varied success with women or being social with other people – one of the women he went out with, but whom we do not see in the film, was named Naomi – he found himself clicking in response to the other main characters’ more external quirks. Joel was slightly more brokenhearted about his relationship with Clementine crumbling because, after thinking Joel had it nice and steady with her, it would never have occurred to him that Clementine would’ve been wild enough to make her way with any man she met. So it’s almost like her instinctive nature broke Joel’s heart because he felt like he was dumped for the type of person he usually was.

Hopping over to Clementine, she was a genuinely out-there and spontaneous young lady who was interpreted as just the type of girl who would’ve knocked any guy’s socks off, as Joel was when he first met her at a beach picnic. However, the fact that she was so outgoing that she began meeting up with other people and other men behind Joel’s back drove the wedge between her and Joel regarding their relationship. She thought of Joel as insecure and too needy and didn’t feel like she needed him, prompting her to be the first to rely on Lacuna to help wipe her memories clean of Joel. It prompted Joel to follow suit and ask Lacuna to do the same with him regarding his memories of Clementine. Of course, while both characters were equally fascinating in what they expressed and had going for each other, the movie was primarily Joel’s story. We’d see all of the erasure procedures occurring from Joel’s head, and it’s through him that I understood just how strong their love was and would have been during its more trying times. 

While the rest of the characters primarily stemmed from the Lacuna company, the movie did its homework to pay attention to each of their dilemmas, even if, again, some of the characters were given the spotlight more than others.

You would think that their characters would be just regular everyday scientists who show up to do Joel’s bidding, and that’s that, right? Well, when you get to know them more, how they cooperated, how they handled their work, and what they did both out of work and with each other, suddenly you’d notice an arising, complicated web of connections that paints them in a different and surprisingly engaging light. 

Mary Svevo started as a seemingly dignified professional doctor who knew the ins and outs of the Lacuna memory erasure procedures and expressed a somewhat elegant side. But the longer she got involved with her coworkers’ operations, the more she began reevaluating her life choices and even her career when specific memories of hers slowly began to return and haunt her further. I’ll elaborate on that soon.

Her coworker, Stan Fink, played by Mark Ruffalo, was also a dignified and knowledgeable guy who took his job seriously, almost as if he had performed his jobs at Lacuna for a long time. But it wasn’t until unsuspected pushbacks in his erasure procedures challenged him regarding how willing he was to combat anything that worked against his machinery’s procedures, as he noticed from Joel’s mind fighting against the machine’s attempts to wipe his memories clean of Clementine.

His assistant, Patrick, seemed like a generally unorthodox character and lazy as a Lacuna coworker, for he decided to ditch his work while he was with Stan so he could go out on more dates. And, he did admit that he previously stole the panties of her date, along with tinkering with the Lacuna patients’ sources of their memories as a means to make a decent impression on whichever ladies he went out with. Even if Patrick didn’t seem like the villainous type and these ‘memories’ were discarded, this action still portrays him in a pretty perverted light.

As for the Lacuna head, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, he came across as a generally levelheaded physician who wanted to ensure that the memory-erasing procedures went like clockwork without any additional problems intermingling with what they planned to pull off. But when it came down to his more personal matters, that’s when he started to engage in more emotionally heavy and heated tribulations concerning his life choices, which, again, I’ll elaborate on very shortly.

But before I go into more detail about them, and besides the surreal imagery, I’ll start by highlighting one strong point that I thought played into the film’s timeless essence: the casting.

Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Tom Wilkinson. It is truly some of the most fabulous casting I’ve ever seen assembled for a movie of this scale, and the icing on the cake was how they were all big-name stars around the time this film came out. Get a load of this: the last time Kate Winslet got into a serious relationship on screen was with Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, which made a superstar out of her. Jim Carrey had been long famous as a comedian, especially with, among other things, his impersonations of the Grinch. Elijah Wood rose to superstardom after carrying all three Lord of the Rings films on his shoulders. You could argue that this film was one of Mark Ruffalo’s earliest major roles in film before becoming an acting icon as the Hulk in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And finally, Kirsten Dunst already got her big break as a child star before coming into her own as an up-and-coming actress with her role as Mary Jane Watson in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films. That’s quite a nice blazing trail of events for each of them to have left behind in their wake, and here they were, all huddling together to create a mind-bending trip into the psyche of a lovesick man wanting to have a new start in life.

But while the casting altogether was remarkable, it’s even better when not one actor skimped on their performances. While some were not expressed as openly as the rest, what they each brought to the table throughout the film contributed a great deal to the complexity and intrigue concerning all the characters involved and the personal psyches that this film mastered, starting with John and Clementine.

Everyone may have said this already, but Jim Carrey and Jim Kate Winslet shone like a light. 

In this film, Jim Carrey, a famous professional comedian, did an incredible job of imbuing some of his sillier moments with his trademark humor while responding to the essence of a dramatic film with his own take on such circumstances. As a result, he helped every situation concerning Joel feel more natural, believable, and nothing like a comedian attempting to blend into a dramatic atmosphere. When Carrey looked sad, it emphasized his comedic nature in some scenes, whereas in others, his heartbreak felt raw and appropriate. Carrey took his character’s conditions very seriously and reflected Joel’s pensive and downhearted nature once the love of his life voluntarily drifted away from him.

Whenever I think of Kate Winslet, I think of her as playing the more collected and generally serious heroine. But here, she let herself go in a good way, to a point where her nearly wild factors helped paint Clementine in a fascinating and equally likable light. I’d admire her spontaneous actions and instinctive ways of dealing with life but also feel just a tad turned off when she started getting a little too out of control with herself, which is one of the reasons why Joel wanted to have his memories of her wiped clean. Winslet even nailed it in mastering her likenesses in Joel’s mind, the parts of her that seemed influenced by Joel’s mind as he allowed it to pressure him into seeing Clementine in every situation he remembered being in with or without Clementine by his side. Kate Winslet sold her character in the real world and Joel’s brain and had it so that she remained the same person, as if whatever she said and did came from her head, not Joel’s head.

But it’s not just the dilemmas of the main couple that drive the movie forward. Even the Lacuna crew is not without some compelling storylines to most of them. For all of the personnel’s expertise, what with wiping memories clean from their customers, to what point would they have contemplated wiping each other’s memories as well? This film went the extra mile to flesh out some of the supporting characters and convey them with mannerisms and life stories that portrayed them in a more intriguing light than you would’ve anticipated from them as characters.

I’m also impressed by the movie’s treatment of the Lacuna doctors who operated on Joel, played by Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, and Tom Wilkinson. 

For example, Mark Ruffalo conveyed his character as if he took his job the most seriously compared to Kirsten Dunst’s character, Mary. In fact, I looked at both Stan and Mary as if to say that they both took their job seriously while also not being without their playful side when they were not busy trying to prioritize their focus on the operation at hand. However, the longer they spent their time together, the more fun they had together, to the point of Mary being stoned, in which case, she didn’t want to make that known whenever she was in Mierzwiak’s presence.

As for Patrick, he initially went along to help Joel with the operation but was instead prompted to ditch work and go out on a date. But to make things even more twisted, the guy that Clementine started going out with at Barnes and Noble, who caused Joel to want to go forth with having his memories of Clementine erased, happened to be Patrick. In other words, the guy who inadvertently caused Joel and Clementine’s relationship to crumble also worked for Lacuna as an assistant and went out with Clementine after her memory of Joel was wiped clean.

And remember what I mentioned about Patrick tinkering with the Lacuna patients’ discarded sources of their nonexistent memories and how he tried to sneak some of them in to woo the ladies? Let’s say that he unknowingly grabbed some of Joel’s objects during one of his attempts to woo Clementine, and he inadvertently triggered something inside of Clementine that she didn’t recognize yet was somehow familiar.

I should pay attention to Mary’s side of the story as well. Outside of being played with evident nuance and professionalism by Kristen Dunst, what Mary experienced felt a little on par with what John and Clementine experienced in the movie. However, whereas Joel and Clementine got their memories of each other wiped away out of reactionary heartbreak, Mary’s reason for having her memories wiped out is a much trickier case. The love instincts Mary felt were more complicated, and she did her best not to indulge in what she feared could be improper, romantic pursuits, which she experienced with Howard Mierzwiak.

The first time I saw the relationship between them, I initially saw it as a new client admiring the professionalism of her superior. But once she landed him a quick kiss, I could tell that perhaps Mary admired him for more reasons than just watching him excel at his work. Once we learn that Mierzwiak had a wife and kids, that honed in the desperation from Mary to want to have her feelings for him wiped away so she could devote her life more to her career, especially since she just got started there at Lacuna, only for her negotiations with him and how he did his work to instead reignite inner feelings that Mary was scared to experience again, not just for professional reasons, but also because, due to their age difference, she wanted to keep their relationship in just that level. 

I would never have guessed that the writing and the intrigue that comes with it would’ve extended to the supporting cast, but I’m impressed that it spent as much time and tender loving care on the supporting characters as it did on Jim Carrey and Kate Wiley’s characters. It got to a point where I felt as intrigued by their relationship issues as I was with that between Joel and Clementine.

In hindsight, it’s not just the acting that helped bring this movie to a higher level of entertainment and thoughtful art. One of the most ingenious aspects of this movie, I’ll have to agree with everyone else, is the story.

Despite its sci-fi nature, since it elaborates on a company that prioritizes erasing memories, the movie was clever about introducing us to several characters who all had a lot of emotional baggage that they had to vent out either through Lacuna’s mental procedures or through how they handled their own problems, such as with Stan, Patrick, and Mierzwiak. They all attempted to resolve their issues as diligently as possible, or as they thought was the proper way to go, until unforeseen circumstances slowly cropped up that threw their evaluations of those situations out of whack.

Equally as engaging are the lives of Joel, Clementine, and Mary. 

When you look closer at how each of the characters dealt with their problems and why even the supporting cast felt so committed to upholding their jobs at Lacuna, you suddenly begin to appreciate what the film had to say in terms of escaping life’s troubles and avoiding them, thinking that it would shelter them from the woes of the world, only to find out that what they were seeking may not be the best method of action, and that even if they could achieve it, it would only be temporary before they come again to catch them when they least expect them to.

But when the movie dove into Joel’s mind, it explored the many facets of his background in the most surreal way possible, and just like the casting, it made the movie for me. It primarily evaluates Joel and Clementine’s relationship before it slowly went downhill as Joel remembered it. At first, it started with him just experiencing each memory one by one as they slowly faded away in front of him. But later, when Joel caught on to why his relationship with Clementine mattered so much while unconscious, he fought against Lacuna’s procedures trickling inside of him and trying to wipe his memory clean of Clementine, even if it would’ve been futile. For all the heartbreak he endured from his relationship with Clementine, the rest of that relationship was genuine and meaningful, too much so for him to let go. No matter how hard he wanted to set himself apart from Clementine in response to what she did to him, he still couldn’t have found it to get rid of her in his head. 

From that point onward, since it occurred midway through the process, he habitually remembered his childhood memories and sneaked Clementine where Clementine would typically not have been with him, let alone at every stage of his life that he experienced them. It blended memories and fragments together so well that it functioned almost like a visual portrait of Joel’s life story when he evaluated his relationship with Clementine compared to what he lived through and how he lived it beforehand. It only reinforces the values of his relationship with Clementine and that throwing the baby out with bathwater would not have been the smartest way to go about it.

Remember what I was talking about with Simba and how he took advantage of Timon and Pumbaa’s carefree nature of the Hakuna Matata lifestyle out of a complicated web of emotions over what he thought he had done back in Pride Rock until he was reminded that running away from his problems instead of dealing with them is not the right way to go? And that there was only so long Simba could’ve indulged in it before being given a chance to be better than he was at that moment to set things right? I felt the same thing throughout the memory procedures throughout this film, except it’s applied to more than just the main hero. Several other characters felt compelled to give this a whirl, thinking it was the best way forward when it could have functioned as nothing more than just a bandaid for wounds that would inevitably have healed with or without it.

But it only gets better. Near the end of the movie, we’d find ourselves retracing some of the steps from the first 10 or 15 minutes of the film. So when we watch the movie again from the very beginning onwards, suddenly what we see is not just one meeting of Joel and Clementine, but rather their second meeting after they’ve wiped their memories clean of each other, just like how they got to know each other and have some fun with each other the first time. With that in mind, it opens up the likelihood that, maybe this time, they might have made it stick. The cast and crew admitted that as they saw it, Joel and Clementine could have gone through with their relationship again, caught on to something imperfect about each other, and requested to have their memories wiped again, only for them to do the same thing over and over again.

The way I see it? Because Joel and Clementine were so torn about each other that they were willing to wipe each other clean from their memories only to meet up again and slowly start to rekindle their relationship without them knowing they’re rekindling it, that tells me that either the memory wiping wasn’t going to last long anyway, and that they were going to slowly slip back into each other’s lives sooner or later, or perhaps that it might even have been pointless since they were bound to meet up again at some point. Heck, would it even matter whether they’d have their memories wiped clean of each other? No matter how Joel and Clementine loved or hated each other, as long as they knew that they were a good fit for each other, then it’s gonna take a lot more than just wiping each other from their consciousness to make them truly separated and less likely to fall in love with each other again.

That’s the kind of film this is. It’s a romantic film that dives deep into the psyche of some of its characters and explores their inner longings, inner flaws, inner regrets, and whether or not wiping those faulty aspects of their memories clean is a proper way to handle the problems of life, or even if it was going to be a matter of time before they would’ve slowly slipped back into reality.

There is only one issue I have with this movie. Because the movie did such an incredible job of exploring Joel’s emotional highs and lows, even if most of it was from his head, and even with Mary from outside her head, there’s a part of me that wished we would’ve appreciated Clementine the same way. All I remember about her was that she probably partook in the beach party to meet up with some friends or family and that she and Joel wanted a beachside hut for them to nestle in together. But because she was such a carefree character and that much of the film’s conflict centered around Clementine getting around with other people, I wished at times that the movie took the extra time to focus on her background so we could see what she went through to have made her want to get rid of her memories of Joel in the first place. What would’ve made her want to go forth and act all crazy and outgoing? If I felt such emotions through Joel’s mental journey, what’s stopping the movie from showcasing Clementine’s path and background the same way? Of course, I get the feeling that Clementine’s character and background were explored the same way Mary’s were, but it feels like they only came close to being on the same level of exposition as Mary.

But I can tell you that I won’t rely on any memory-cleaning device to rid me of this film anytime soon. Much like Joel with his relationship with Clementine, I find this movie too precious to let go. 

The writing is stupendous. The acting is incredible. The characters are all very nuanced and believable, not to mention written with much intrigue. By the time the movie got the ball rolling on its evaluations of Joel’s mental state of being, that’s when it started to take on a more surreal venture into the inner psyches of the lovesick and the attempts they would’ve attempted to achieve in ridding themselves of the pain that’s followed them even if they weren’t aware that there’s only so long that the pain that they wanted to get rid of would’ve lasted on their own. Everything about this film is very pure and aesthetically cohesive, and its trippy visuals still invite us to think long and hard about what and who we hold so dear to us and why some of the more precious memories are the ones worth holding onto and that that’s what we should be paying attention to more instead of dwelling on the memories that cause heartache. 

Whether you’re into romance or not, prepare to crank your open-mindedness to high gear. You might find yourself entranced by this film for that reason.

My Rating

A high A