Hey folks, Harry here... This is a very positive review of ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, where the reviewer had a problem with the "resolution" of the film which King Midas goes into... so BEWARE OF SPOILERS! I'll address the ending at the bottom of the piece...
Hi Harry,
About a month ago I moved to New York from the great Pacific Northwest so imagine my surprise when after having been in town all of two days and while attending my first movie here, I got invited to the test screening of Eternal Sunshine. It shocked me just how many people declined the offer to go to a free movie but having never been to an advance screening of any kind before, I jumped at the opportunity. Anyway, being busy with the move and all I never got a chance to write in, but since you said you wanted to hear more and since I’ve been a long time reader of your site, I figured I’d contribute something.
First off, let me say that I went in with absolutely no idea of what to expect. I had vague recollections of your site mentioning a new Charlie Kaufman flick months ago, I was a big fan of Being John Malkovich, and I rather enjoyed Adaptation although I was probably a little let down due to the extremely high expectations I had developed in the months before I actually saw the movie. Beyond this, though, I was a clean slate and I found Eternal Sunshine to be a very good movie – I liked it better than Adaptation though not quite as much as Malkovich.
The acting is top-notch and definitely the movie’s strong point. I agree completely with what your other reviewer said – Kate Winslet really steals the movie. Jim Carry is phenomenal as well, Elijah Wood stands out as sufficiently creepy in a pathetic kind of way, and all the other actors do a wonderful job of giving their characters a depth that is never fully elaborated on in the script. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, as the movie belongs to Carrey and Winslet and you find out just enough about the people around them to make it interesting without detracting from the main story.
As for the main story, it’s a bit confusing at the start and really does take some time to get going and let the audience in on what’s really happening. I heard a lot of people afterwards comparing it to Memento. It’s not really told backwards but definitely plays out of sequence. We start pretty much on the last day of the movie time wise with Jim Carrey’s Joel meeting Kate Winslet’s Clementine. They believe they’re strangers but as things progress we realize that they dated for a number of years until Clementine, apparently on a whim but very much within her character, decides to have Joel erased from her memory. Fairly miserable without Clementine, Joel decides to do the same and this leads to the movie’s most delightful and inventive sequence. In the middle of the procedure, Joel subconsciously decides that it would be a mistake to erase Clementine and embarks on a journey through his own mind to hide his remaining memories of Clementine from the technicians trying to eradicate them. Again, these are absolutely wonderful scenes filled with creative imagery, good humor, and also a lot of important information on what turned their relationship sour and what lead Clementine to do what she did in the first place.
Obviously, since they do not know each other when they meet at the beginning of the movie, Joel failed in his attempt to save the memories, and the movie returns to the present and their new day together as happy strangers. However, due to another plot twist that I won’t reveal here, they quickly learn of their past history by listening to tapes that they each made before deciding to have the other erased from memory. It’s a superbly acted sequence as they both listen in horror to their own rantings about someone that they think they just met. However, this also leads to the biggest problem I had with the movie – the ending where they decide to give their relationship another shot. It just seems far too abrupt. Knowing how absolutely miserable they are on those tapes, and having just listened to the other person basically list off every fault and dislike, they say far too little to each other to make it believable that they would even want to try again. This also isn’t helped by the fact that too many of the memories that Joel unconsciously goes through in the middle of the movie aren’t really good ones and we never fully get a sense that they were ever truly happy together.
However, this is not to say that I didn’t like the movie. By the end you definitely want to see these two people together and the hopeful conclusion is a nice balance to the rather melancholy tone of the rest of the picture. I just would have liked to see a bit more elaboration at the end to make the finale more believable. Overall, though, this is a very good movie, bordering on excellent, filled with the kind of intriguing freshness that we’ve all come to expect from Kaufman. I’ll definitely be in line to see this again when it finally gets released and I won’t mind paying for it in the slightest. Anyway, thanks for the great site and if you use this call me King Midas.
Harry here again... seems that King Midas' not caring for the end is missing the point of the film. You see... while we see all the hell that Joel and Clementine go through... how much they didn't work well together... We know they shouldn't stay together, that they should move on, but... because they're playing with their memories... Erasing everything that we've learned about what doesn't work about them proves the axiom... "Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it!" This is a film that tells us that our bad memories, the pain and anguish we have... it's what keeps us moving forward in life without repeating all the horrible things that we've gone through. This film isn't about easy happily ever afters or even simple unhappy endings... this film is supposed to leave making you think. At least, I hope it is.
