Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I started off with this movie for a few reasons: My class started talking about it the other day, and everyone who'd seen it (most of the class) oved it, it was on netflix so it was easy to get a hold of, and I wanted something that had the potential of making me think. It's safe to say, I did think about it afterward. I was going to write the review right after I had watched it so everything was fresh in my mind, but I couldn't even get close to forming coherent thoughts. I needed time to process.

First off, I want to say that I am not Jim Carrey's (Joel Barish) biggest fan. His humor generally annoys me more than anything else. That being said, I absolutely loved him in this movie. The more serious role suited him well. In my mind, it made him much more likeable and less grating, and when the movie called for him to be funny, especially in the flashbacks of him as a child, he was absolutely hilarious. Carrey and Kate Winslet (Clementine Kruczynski) were a great pair. Neither of them overshadowed the other, which can happen when you have two demanding actors side by side. The rest of the characters portrayed by Mark Ruffalo (Stan), Kirsten Dunst (Mary), Elijah Wood (Patrick), and Tom Wilkonson (Dr. Mierzwiak) interlaced perfectly and held their own against the two title actors.

Aside from the acting I really enjoyed several other aspects of the movie. I liked the attention to colour sceme and the correlation of the scheme to the mood. At the beginning, the blue tones in the introduction created this feeling of barrenness. As Clementine was introduced, the tones became warmer, and I liked how, even when there was conflict between Clementine and Joel, there was still a brightness associated with her.

The shot style was very interesting. Odd jump cuts in the time sequence played with the changing timeline in the movie, and instead of making the movie seem oddly jumpy, helped to bring fluidity. Not to mention, it helped cover up any of the distracting mistakes many movies have between shots with hair not being in the same place, or characters not being in the same position. Every camera movement was thought about and calculated. If it didn't need to move to convey the story, it didn't. This especially came through in the transitions from scene to scene when characters frequently walked through a doorway and into the next setting.


The lighting and effects were beautiful. And while the effects were overtly cheesy in some places, you didn't get the feeling that it was because the crew couldn't have had better effects. The effects were cheesy because they wanted them to be.

This movie also played a lot with the idea that we are who we are because of the memories we have and the people we meet along the way. While we might want to erase painful parts of our past, often the better memories make it all worth it, as Joel clearly learns while his memory is being erased. What if people could have certain parts of their memory erased? Would we begin to lose our humanity over time? In many ways, I think the bad parts of our relationships is what gives us our empathy. Without that, would we eventually devolve into emotionless beings?

In the end I have to give this movie a high rating. There's really nothing I could find to critique. Everything was so well thought out and planned, down to the last detail. If you haven't seen this movie, you definitely should. And if nothing else, it will leave you speechless at the end.