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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Reviews

...giving us an ending that is more painfully honest and, as a result, more romantic.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 16, 2024

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of the purest examinations of love, and it never pulls any punches.

Full Review | Feb 20, 2024

We’re quick to run to love, away from it, to spur it on, or move on from it. In no other film is this more clear than Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind.

Full Review | Sep 1, 2023

The wacky sight gags and psycho-drama slapstick is tinged with melancholy and regret ...

Full Review | May 6, 2023

Eternal classic, not much else to say.

Full Review | Mar 21, 2023

This finely crafted surrealism comes with rich poignancy.

Full Review | Mar 13, 2023

An odd sort of love story, a melancholy rumination that's as much about the head as the heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 15, 2023

I did not care about these people and their problems even one tiny bit.

Full Review | Oct 21, 2022

It is a film that demands the presence of thoughts we put aside when surrounded by people, things we only think about when we're alone, buried in everlasting thoughts. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is the rarest of all films...

Full Review | Sep 28, 2022

I can honestly say that “I got it” during my second viewing and my appreciation for what the movie does is unquestioned.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 20, 2022

At times it seems as if Roman Polanski adapted a rom com written by Philip K. Dick... [Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind] is the most tenebrous romantic comedy ever filmed. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 14, 2022

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is weird and chaotic and not linear, which wonderfully mirrors what memories are like.

Full Review | Mar 26, 2021

My problem with Eternal Sunshine is I found it very surface-level

Full Review | Feb 21, 2021

There is another couplet in Eloisa to Abelard that perhaps has a bearing on the Gondry-Kaufman film: "Of all affliction taught a lover yet,/'Tis sure the hardest science to forget."

Full Review | Feb 15, 2021

Touching, tragic, inspiring, funny, hopeful, and, most importantly, powerfully romantic.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 29, 2020

[The film] shows us that all real relationships are worth remembering, and that the connections we have with others are something worthy enough to fight for.

Full Review | Aug 10, 2020

[Jim Carrey's] vulnerability is stunning, and he has channeled his comedic physicality into a tightly controlled performance that makes the absurd completely believable.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 24, 2020

Without a doubt, one of the best films of all-time regarding love, heartbreak and hope. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 15, 2020

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a whirlwind of emotions, and it is the kind of romance that is just grounded enough, in reality, to inspire and incite, but whimsical enough to deserve its own special place in the genre's history.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2020

With a tagline of 'Would you erase me?', I can only beg someone to erase Eternal Sunshine from theaters -- quickly.

Full Review | Nov 6, 2019

The Movie Review: 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'

It's often said that smell is the sense most closely tied to memory. This is nonsense. Yes, a scent may on occasion provoke an emphatic, unmediated recollection, but it is typically an imprecise one--a general period in one's life rather than a particular moment. Our specific memories, by contrast, are primarily visual and auditory, not unlike a movie playing in the mind's eye. It's hardly surprising, then, that cinema has often been described as a kind of synthetic memory.  As John Malkovich, playing director F.W. Murnau in Shadow of the Vampire , explained, "We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory, but our memory will neither blur nor fade."

With Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry have created a film whose entire purpose is to blur and fade, a self-erasing tribute to the fragility of memory and of love. The film, released on video this week, begins simply enough: One cold, gray Valentine's morning, moody introvert Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey) decides on impulse to skip work and take a train out to Montauk, Long Island. There, on a desolate beach, he encounters manic extrovert Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet). The two begin talking on the train ride home to New York, and over the next two nights love begins to bloom.

But as with Kaufman's earlier scripts ( Human Nature , Being John Malkovich , Adaptation ), things soon turn complicated. This is not the new romance that Joel and Clementine perceive it to be. The two of them have, in fact, just recently broken up after two years of living together. Eager to "get on with her life," Clementine had all memory of Joel erased from her mind by a low-rent medical outfit called Lacuna. Discovering Clementine's betrayal, Joel decided to have the procedure performed on himself as well. That night, unconscious in his bed as Lacuna technicians work (and play) around him, Joel relives each memory of Clementine even as it is wiped from his brain. The erasing process (and with it, the movie) works backward in time, beginning with the most recent memories, full of fights and ill-will. But as the process reaches further back, to moments of tenderness and joy, Joel rediscovers his love for Clementine and realizes he does not want to lose these memories after all. He tries frantically to find an obscure corner of his mind where he can hide some scrap of her from the technicians' hunt and destroy mission, but they always find him. He watches helplessly as, one by one, each memory is irretrievably lost--titles fade from the covers of books, passersby disappear, and then Clementine too vanishes, only to reappear in another doomed recollection, all the way back to their very first meeting, at a beach party in Montauk.

The story-told-in-reverse is a common enough movie device, usually utilized to conceal information from the audience. But Kaufman and Gondry use it to a different end, gradually uncovering not hidden facts but forgotten emotions. There are no unexpected twists or sudden revelations about Joel and Clementine, just a wistful backward view of love's decay. Unlike Kaufman's previous work, Eternal Sunshine sets out not to stun us with the originality of its gimmicks, but rather to wound us with the earnest familiarity of its sentiment.

At least, that's the case when it comes to the film's treatment of Joel and Clementine's relationship. But even as the film explores that two-year love affair, it also recounts the events of one night--the night that Joel lies in bed while Lacuna's memory thieves pillage his brain. The scatter-brained, vaguely adolescent technicians in charge of the procedure are Stan (Mark Ruffalo, endearing in Clark Kent glasses and a chaotic pompadour) and Patrick (Elijah Wood, looking all of 14). When Stan's quasi-girlfriend Mary (Kirsten Dunst) comes over to see him, Patrick decides to leave and spend time with his own new squeeze, Clementine--yes, the same one, whom he fell for while erasing her mind a few days earlier and has been wooing with lines stolen from her lost memories of Joel ever since. While Stan and Mary party around the dreaming Joel, the procedure hits a snag; Stan is forced to call in Lacuna's founder, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), for whom Mary has long held a powerful schoolgirl crush. These amorous convolutions culminate in the one great surprise of the film, a poignant twist that underscores the cruelty of Lacuna's benevolent oblivion and both complicates and clarifies Joel and Clementine's post-erasure reunion.

At its core, Eternal Sunshine is about the need for atonement and redemption. "Freed" from the memory of their painful breakup, Joel and Clementine can no longer forgive nor ask forgiveness for past hurts received or inflicted, and can reconcile neither with one another nor with themselves. Their past together is like a frayed nerve that leads nowhere, the phantom limb of the amputee. No matter how many times they wander in the footsteps of their lost memories they can never recapture them. It is only through Fate or God's grace or True Love--or, for the more literal-minded, a glitch in Lacuna's process--that they are given a second chance to make themselves whole. These are admirably big themes.

Eternal Sunshine loses its way on occasion, particularly in the sequences where Joel reverts first to childhood and then to infancy in his effort to find a place in his memory where he can hide Clementine. In both scenes the figure we are watching onscreen ceases to be Joel Barrish and becomes immediately recognizable as Jim Carrey, circa 1994. The mugging and mewling Carrey brings to these scenes might be funny in another context, but they relate to nothing else in the tone or content of the film. One almost wonders whether there's a rider in Carrey's contract insisting, "Star retains the right to do something rubbery with his face at least once during project." It's a pity, too, because otherwise Carrey is refreshingly un-Carrey here, responding passively to the acute hyperactivity with which Winslet imbues Clementine.

And while it's impossible not to think of Eternal Sunshine as Kaufman's film (fair or not), Gondry directs it with wisdom and nuance. Movies often portray memories and dream states with a hyperreal vividness, made up of garish colors (or stark black and white), absurdist landscapes, and, yes, sometimes even dwarves. Gondry takes the opposite course, filming Eternal Sunshine with an aggressive lack of style, or at least of stylization. Scenes are dimly lit and hazily filmed (cinematographer Ellen Kuras filled many of the sets with smoke before shooting), lending the movie an almost documentary feel. Even when special effects are called for--when a fence must evaporate or a character disappear from a fading memory--Gondry underplays them as much as possible. The result is a cinematic vagueness that makes the film less aesthetic yet more persuasive. This is how dreams really look: like reality, only less so.

But Eternal Sunshine 's elusiveness is not limited to its look. One of the least remarked upon achievements of the film may also be its most cunning: just how unmemorable Joel and Clementine's relationship is. Its general contours are clear enough--Clementine always pushing and testing, Joel always retreating and nursing grievances--but its details are easily forgotten. The dialogue is unremarkable (Clementine explains how when she was little she thought she was ugly, and Joel tells her she's pretty), and the conflicts somewhat generic (she thinks she's ready to be a mother, he doesn't). "There's something weirdly ephemeral about Eternal Sunshine ," Brian Johnson of Maclean's wrote following the film's theatrical release. "Just two days after seeing it, my own memory of the film has almost completely evaporated, like a dream. Which is not to say that the movie is forgettable--I'm still clinging to the strange but familiar emotions it raised, and am curious to see it again to see just where they came from." Johnson was on to something: The film provokes an intense, yet oddly unspecific emotional response. Like a memory that has been not-quite-successfully erased. Or maybe a smell.

The Home Movies List: Memories are made of this

Vertigo (1958). If filmmaking is the production of counterfeit memories, then Vertigo is a movie within a movie, with Jimmy Stewart as the director and Kim Novak as his star. (As badly as Stewart mistreats Novak, Hitchcock was reputed to treat his leading ladies worse.)

La Jetée (1962). Probably the most striking 28-minute film of all time, a philosophical time travel story told entirely in black-and-white stills and voice-over. (If Borges had made movies, this is what they would have looked like.) The loose remake Twelve Monkeys quadrupled the running time, but felt thinner nonetheless.

After Life (a.k.a. Wandafuru raifu ) (1999). A sweeter, gentler Defending Your Life . Upon dying, souls travel to a way station where kindly bureaucrats help each one choose the favorite memory he will carry with him into eternity.

Memento (2000). The rare gimmick movie that lives up to, and even exceeds, its gimmick. Whereas Joel and Clementine's amnesia prevents them from finding their closure, Leonard Shelby's forces him to find his, violently, again and again.

Capturing the Friedmans (2003). Given the timing, nothing was going to beat The Fog of War for Best Documentary. But this fascinating, Rashômon -like exploration of a Long Island child-abuse case--told largely through the family's contemporaneous home movies--deserved the statuette.

This post originally appeared at TNR.com.

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‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’: thr’s 2004 review.

On March 9, 2004, the Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet film premiered in Los Angeles.

By Kirk Honeycutt

Kirk Honeycutt

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On March 9, 2004, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, premiered in Los Angeles. The film went on to win an Oscar at the 77th Academy Awards for Charlie Kaufman’s original screenplay. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below.

Charlie Kaufman has finally nailed that elusive third act.

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'deadwood': thr's 2004 review, 'family guy': thr's 1999 review.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind  is not only his most accessible and romantic screenplay, it’s his most complete. The third act works like a charm and pulls all his themes, characters and conflicts together beautifully.

The film will appeal to Jim Carrey fans and women drawn by Kate Winslet, but there will be a strong core audience of young and older adults who can’t wait to see the latest Kaufman brain-tickler. None will be disappointed. Focus Features should enjoy above-average box office for this spotless confection.

The references to the mind and brain in the preceding paragraphs are apt because the movie basically takes place in the mind of Joel Barish (Carrey). Barish knows his relationship with live-in girlfriend Clementine (Winslet) is unraveling, but he gets the shock of his life when he learns that she has had her memory of him completely erased from her mind. Rushing to see the inventor of this process, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), he impulsively decides to undergo the procedure, too.

After taking a knockout pill at night, Joel falls into a deep sleep while two of Mierzwiak’s assistants, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood), enter his apartment in Yonkers and strap on memory-erasing headgear. Using a map of Clementine’s presence in Joel’s brain that Dr. Mierzwiak traced the previous day, the brain-scanning device searches and destroys each memory one by one.

Stan is mildly disconcerted about this but is much more disturbed when his patient begins to resist the procedure and he must call Dr. Mierzwiak for backup.

Which brings us to the second reality — in Joel’s mind. As his memories of Clementine vanish, Joel begins to realize how much he will miss her and what an impact her impetuous nature made on his orderly, over-regulated life. He tries desperately to hide his memory of her in places in his life she never visited. The movie then becomes a race between Joel’s frantic efforts to cling to a piece of Clementine and the mad scientists in pursuit of those memories.

Director Michel Gondry, a French music video director who made his directorial debut with Kaufman’s Human Nature , beautifully orchestrates Ellen Kuras’ cinematography, Dan Leigh’s production design and Valdis Oskarsdottir’s editing so memories merge and evaporate seemingly in a single shot. Joel and Clementine move through space as the scenes behind them change and morph like animation cels gone mad.

It’s a wonderful concept — to see a couple relive their life together, going backward, but able to make comments on what each was thinking and to see how each may have misread the other. Most exciting of all is that third act, where characters who no longer know one another must find each other again using the heart and not the mind.

For all its science fiction plot, Eternal Sunshine is no special-effects extravaganza. The emphasis is always on the characters, their hearts and minds. — Kirk Honeycutt, originally published on March 12, 2004

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Summary Joel (Carrey) is stunned to discover that his girlfriend Clementine (Winslet) has had her memories of their tumultuous relationship erased. Out of desperation, he contacts the inventor of the process, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Wilkinson), to have Clementine removed from his own memory. But as Joel's memories progressively disappear, he beg ... Read More

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, why eternal sunshine of the spotless mind remains unforgettable.

Despite its gently bummed-out vibe, " Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind " is a sneakily powerful film. It’s so affecting, in fact, that I get a little sad just thinking about the story and characters. Even though I saw "Eternal Sunshine" twice in a theater when it came out and put it on my 2004 Top 10 list, I only revisited it once more after that (to be interviewed for a video essay that, as far as I know, is no longer available online) and haven’t watched it since. It’s not just the story itself that’s piercing; it’s the film’s visualization of memories being destroyed, which hits harder now after seeing so many older friends and relatives (including my mother) succumb to Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a truly great film that can be endlessly appreciated and analyzed for what it’s actually about even while it acquires secondary meanings. 

" Eternal Sunshine" is the most perfect film ever made from a Charlie Kaufman screenplay, although Kaufman’s self-written directorial debut “ Synecdoche, New York ” is an altogether greater, or at least more grandly ambitious, work. Michel Gondry ’s decision to shoot almost the entire film in a handheld, quasi-documentary style and have all the special effects appear to have been accomplished in-camera (i.e. through trickery on the set itself, in the manner of a filmed stage production) even when they were digitally assisted doesn’t just sell the idea that everything in the story is “really happening” even when it’s a memory: it blurs the line between what’s real and what’s remembered, an integral aspect of Kaufman’s script that informs every line and scene. The “spotlight” effects created by swinging flashlights on dark streets and in unlit interiors are especially disturbing. When the characters run or hide in those sorts of compositions in sequences, the film boldfaces its otherwise subtly acknowledged identity as a science fiction movie. Past and present (and possible future) lovers Joel Barish ( Jim Carrey ) and Clementine Kruczynski ( Kate Winslet ) might as well be rebels in a Terminator film, scampering through bombed-out panoramas and trying not to get zapped by a machine. 

Star Jim Carrey was no stranger to dramatic roles by that point in his career, having starred in the media satire “ The Truman Show ,” the Andy Kaufman biography “ Man on the Moon ,” and the 1950s-set romantic thriller “ The Majestic ” (by “ The Shawshank Redemption ” director Frank Darabont , largely forgotten but worth a look). But his performance as Joel Barish (rhymes with perish) stands apart from everything else he’s done because of its staunchly life-sized approach. It’s a performance as a regular guy that’s entirely free of movie star egocentrism, unflatteringly (or perhaps just unselfconsciously) depicted from start to finish. It’s not easy to forget all the classic Carrey slapstick gyrations that preceded it, and that made him one of the most bankable stars of the 1990s, but somehow you do. He even looks different in the face, somehow. If I’d gone into it not knowing it was him, I might’ve thought, “Who is that actor? He’s excellent, and he looks kinda like Jim Carrey.”

Kate Winslet, who became an international star with Peter Jackson ’s “ Heavenly Creatures ” and a superstar with “ Titanic ,” established herself as a bona fide character actress in this film. She inhabited Clementine so completely that she unknowingly perfected a type: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, as per Nathan Rabin’s wonderful phrase describing a woman who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” I don’t think that’s an entirely accurate description of Clementine as a person; with a bit of distance, she seems more like somebody with undiagnosed mental illness, and Joel is probably right there with her. But it does describe how the role echoed throughout time and through other films and TV shows (including “ Elizabethtown ,” the film Rabin was reviewing when he coined the phrase, and that happens to costar “Eternal Sunshine” cast-member Kirsten Dunst ). There’s no denying the effect the performance had on future movies, which served up endless variations on Clementine.

Gondry’s style creates an analogy for what happens when a person’s memories begin to disintegrate or disappear, in the all-over, “global” sense (Alzheimer's), as well as for the fleeting universal experience of struggling to remember a name, or some aspect of a dream, and somehow managing to grasp a sliver of it, only to see it slip away and vanish. 

The movie also somehow captures that awful knowledge that the personal dramas which consume us go unnoticed by almost everyone else. When it came out, the movie felt so immediate that it was as if you were seeing something that was actually happening, out in the physical world. It still feels like something that could happen because of how it's lit and filmed. The action seems to have been captured entirely in real locations even when the actors are on sets. The locations tend to be unglamorous, with the notable exception of the beach at Montauk where Joel and Clementine first met (there's no way to make a beach seem anything less than majestic). The ordinary magic that constantly happens inside each of us – the staggeringly complicated interplay between present-tense observation and interactions; the stabbing intrusions of memory, fantasy, and trauma – contrasts against boringly regular urban and suburban settings that seem to have been chosen because they are the human equivalent of the featureless mazes where rodents of science reside. When Joel and Clementine race through memory spaces where Joel has hidden memories of Clementine to prevent their erasure, they scamper and stop, twist and change direction. They’re people in a mouse-maze.

There’s also a fascinating matter-of-factness to the way the film presents the interactions of Joel and Clementine and the (largely unseen) team of memory-erasers (headed by Tom Wilkinson , and including Dunst, Mark Ruffalo , and Elijah Wood ; what a cast!), as well as the way the film un-peels the layers of casual corruption surrounding the process by which memories are destroyed. When you have access to a memory erasing machine and no legal or ethical oversight, the tech is bound to be abused. Is there even an ethical way to use it? Is it right to simply erase something traumatic from a person's brain? Is it better than teaching the person how to process, understand, and transcend trauma?

There’s a scene at the end of 1981’s “ Superman II ” where Superman erases Lois Lane’s memory with a super-kiss to protect his secret identity as Clark Kent. The moment was viewed by most audiences at the time as a fairy tale flourish, along the lines of Superman turning back time to save Lois at the end of the first movie. Today it would be considered a non-consensual mental assault, like a roofie. “Eternal Sunshine” sometimes plays like a speculative drama about what would happen if it were possible to replicate Superman’s kiss and turn it into a service that people could pay for. No good could come from such a thing, which is a sure sign that some company out there is hard at work inventing it while its CEO chases billions in startup money from venture capitalists. 

A crude version of the necessary technology has existed for decades. The indiscriminate electroshock therapy that was so common in mental hospitals in the middle part of the 20th century, and that often reduced patients to blankly smiling shells of their former selves, became more precisely targeted, to the point where the procedure is now considered an ordinary part of treatment. Ten years ago, scientists figured out by studying mice how to identify the places in the brain where traumatic or negative memories are kept, and “eradicate” them and/or associate them with pleasure. “In essence,” summed up a piece about the process in The Guardian , “the mice’s memory of what was pleasant and what was unpleasant had been reversed."

The structure of the film is a rich object for study in itself. The very essence of “Eternal Sunshine” is analogous to the unstable process of remembering: remembering the order of events in a story, or the events in one’s own life. Or struggling to remember what happened . Or which thing happened first . And which thing happened after that? Did another thing happen third, or fourth, tenth? Did any of it happen, period? Are you superimposing your fantasies about who was at fault, and who did what to whom, onto events that were factual, and that could be proved or disproved in an objective record, had anyone thought to keep one? The record-keepers records might be faulty, too, or invested in lying or omitting. The movie is kaleidoscopic in its account of how things are remembered, misremembered and forgotten. The opening of the film could also be its ending, and its ending feels like a new beginning. The mouse remains stuck in the maze. When walls and corridors are deleted, and only blank space remains, the mouse struggles to remember the maze.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Review

30 Apr 2004

108 minutes

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

Charlie Kaufman has a problem with endings. As a pure ideas man, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation is without peer. But the third act of his Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind script gets tangled up in its own intrigue; and Malkovich also ends without conviction, limping over the line as if it has not drawn breath since that sprint start. Kaufman's problem with third acts is, in fact, so acute that it becomes the very substance of Adaptation's sour last half hour.

But just as everyone (including Kaufman) was ready to conclude that Charlie's acorns simply do not develop into full-sized trees, along comes the measured growth and glorious blossom of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, his most satisfying fantasy yet. Make no mistake, Eternal Sunshine has a really terrific third act – it's just the first two that threaten to get in the way.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is, in fact, the second Kaufman script helmed by Michel Gondry who, like previous collaborator Spike Jonze, is an acclaimed director of music videos. Their first underrated and unseen venture was Human Nature which – setting aside the almost obligatory 'third act problems' – simply didn't boast the sugary star coating (Rhys Ifans?) that is apparently necessary to make the patented Kaufman weirdness palatable (Cusack, Cage, Clooney). Eternal Sunshine has no such problems, with both an embarrassment of riches on the bench and, front and centre, the biggest star yet to be drawn to the cult of Kaufman: Jim Carrey.

Carrey, his dramatic ego keeping that famous comic id on a tight leash, will no doubt bemuse the Bruce Almighty crowd with his most interior, least expressive role so far – Joel Barish, a character actually described as "close-mouthed". But before any self-styled sophisticates start shouting "see-ya!", Adaptation fans might find themselves equally discomfited, for Eternal Sunshine is not the headlong rush of ideas that its high-concept pitch might have you believe.

A cute but low-key and very long pre-credits sequence gives way to a potentially bewildering opening in which we share Joel's confusion at why his girlfriend is ignoring him. Once Barish discovers her visit to Lacuna Inc. and decides on a tit-for-tat strategy, the majority of the action takes place over one night in one small room and inside one man's rapidly disintegrating memory.

Part fever dream and part chamber piece, it takes a long time before any sunshine at all breaks into what is a melancholic and occasionally bitter first half. However, once Joel's subconscious decides that the procedure is a bad idea and enlists the 'memory' of Clementine (Winslet at her most winning) in a daring escape plan, the movie picks up pace and starts to explore comic areas – teenage humiliation, suppressed trauma – that play to Carrey's obvious strengths and best showcase the undoubted visual verve of Gondry. (The dazzling editing alone demands repeat viewings to unscramble.)

Even better, as Joel's situation becomes more hopeless, the tone miraculously becomes more hopeful, journeying right back to those first, deeply romantic, days with Clementine. All at once, Kaufman's master plan snaps into focus, with the true purpose of the Lacuna technical team (everyone scores in small parts, notably a disarming Dunst) revealed with an unexpected reversal.

A final, bittersweet coda seals the deal; the movie has travelled into light but the memories of darkness past can never be entirely wiped away. No movie since Annie Hall has better captured the entire arc of a relationship, and even Woody Allen stopped short of presenting the beginning and the end at the exact same time.

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Review: 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'

David Edelstein

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.

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FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW; Washing That Girl Out of His Head

By Elvis Mitchell

• March 19, 2004

Correction Appended

Often, when Jim Carrey plays it straight, all of the vitality is drained from his face; he looks like a root- canal patient trying out a pleasant expression for his oral surgeon. In Michel Gondry's ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'' -- a title that will frustrate ushers trying to abbreviate it for marquees -- Mr. Carrey finally understands that he needn't cut a character off from pleasure, and so his Joel Barish is serious rather than anestheticized. But this angular and intelligent romantic comedy isn't entirely consistent. Even as you laugh, it's a movie you admire more than love.

Mr. Gondry, displaying an impressively quicksilver, scrambling technique, doesn't exactly seem to be listening to his actors. You can almost hear him shouting at the gathered crowds just outside the camera frame. It helps that he is working with a much better script than he had for ''Human Nature,'' his previous collaboration with the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Mr. Kaufman has spent more time cataloging -- and sending up -- American bourgeois pettiness and immaturity than any screenwriter going.

One of the funniest things about Mr. Kaufman is that all of his filmed scripts -- ''Being John Malkovich,'' ''Human Nature,'' ''Adaptation'' and now ''Sunshine'' -- sound like titles from REM's ''Reckoning.'' (The title actually comes from a poem by Alexander Pope -- or as one of the characters calls him, ''Pope Alexander.'')

The mournful, paranoid quality of ''Eternal Sunshine,'' which opens nationwide today, especially brings to mind REM's ''South Central Rain'': ''The city on the river, there's a girl without a dream,'' which turns out to be literally true later in this film for Clem (Kate Winslet). Clem is the brash, loquacious bookstore employee who meets Joel (Mr. Carrey) as he wanders the streets alone on Valentine's Day -- a self-consciously poignant conceit if ever there was one. The two of them fall in love under a glum, flannel cloud cover that could use some eternal sunshine.

With her streaks of cobalt-blue hair, Clem has the look of one of those Barnes & Noble information-counter girls whose eyes haze over with contempt if you aren't asking for help finding Thomas Pynchon -- or Charlie Kaufman. Ms. Winslet precisely limns the neurotic assertiveness that makes someone like Clem seem less attractive every time she opens her mouth, yet she also projects the charm of someone who needs to be heard.

Mr. Gondry and the superlative cinematographer Ellen Kuras mock the title by setting the film in a wintry suburban New York and using as many available light sources as possible. A shot of Joel and Clem flat on their backs on a frozen lake is an awe-inspiring piece of visual magic, both romantic and conceptual; they'd both like to freeze the moment. It also captures the differences between the two; Clem had to coerce Joel out of his shell, and he doesn't bother to cloak his resentment until he joins her.

Joel's growing infatuation with Clem is bruised when he finds that she's had all memories of him erased from her mind. Devastated, he goes to the inventor of the process, Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), for the same treatment. When the heart-sick Joel asks if the procedure causes brain damage, Dr. Mierzwiak replies, ''Technically, it is brain damage.''

Mr. Kaufman sets much of the film's second half at Joel's apartment, where the technicians Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood) are giving Joel's mind a Clem-bake, eliminating all traces of her.

The inspiration for ''Sunshine,'' seems to be Harold Ramis's ''Groundhog Day,'' which -- like any great movie -- gains in stature as time passes. Where Bill Murray dominated that film -- and its accomplishment seemed overshadowed because he bestrode the picture like a giant -- ''Sunshine'' is filled with a group of outsize selfish folks whose minor-league brattiness makes the second half of the film funny and ugly.

Stan obviously doesn't have respect for professionalism; he trashes Joel's apartment when his co-worker, May (Kirsten Dunst), joins him. Patrick falls for Clem while dry-cleaning Joel's memories, and takes advantage of his position.

Joel, slightly cognizant of the intruders in his home while he's under, experiences the waking nightmare we've all had, dreaming of the room we've dozed off in and trying to rouse ourselves from sleep. In the meantime, the heartache-cleansing process is stealing away all of his beloved -- and painful -- times with Clem.

This entire section is breathtakingly realized, melting several bad dreams into one, and Mr. Gondry's swift, improvised direction bleaches the portentousness from the conception.

It succeeds so completely that we understand why the director's music videos -- especially his work with Bjork and the White Stripes -- work so well. He can define contradictory emotions with extraordinary clarity and alacrity. It's why he's so suited to handling much of this particular Kaufman script.

But when it comes to getting a single point across in ''Sunshine,'' he's at a loss. Mr. Gondry's witty direction allows the movie to gloss over the fact that this psychological erasure is treated as a given, instead of establishing a social context for accepting the operation -- a major fault.

Dr. Mierzwiak is the only functioning grown-up in the picture and later even he is discovered to have feet of clay. Then again, ''Sunshine'' is a feat of clay, with Mr. Kaufman consistently -- almost compulsively -- handling and reshaping the material, while dropping clues in the opening that all is not what it seems. A key is Joel's stuttering on the word ''remember.'' Mr. Kaufman has conjured the film equivalent of a Philip K. Dick Hallmark card.

The movie has all of the trademarks of a Kaufman script, including hidden recesses of the mind and personality exposed and, most important, a nerdy, socially inept protagonist -- for this scenarist, qualifications for the red badge of courage.

This results in Joel's being the least developed character in the film. Mr. Carrey lugs the picture around on his lachrymal ducts, tear traces nearly burning permanent furrows in his cheeks.

Clem's amorous bullying aside, she's right about Joel. Part of his personality is as lint-gray as the skies in the movie. Dolorous self-pity isn't particularly attractive, though Mr. Carrey doesn't descend into the bathetic.

Joel often appears nondescript, and Mr. Carrey puts in enough understated effort that the lack of delineation almost doesn't register -- a stylized way of compensating for a deficit. He does get to show some aplomb in the final scene, when Joel acts out the most mature sentiment ever found in a Kaufman script, that having one's psyche purged isn't necessarily a good thing.

What becomes of the broken-hearted, after the conversation has dimmed, is that they get over it. And by concluding with an adult realization, ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'' ultimately lets sunlight peek through the gloom, in more ways than one.

''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has strong language, sexuality and alcohol consumption.

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

Directed by Michel Gondry; written by Charlie Kaufman, based on a story by Mr. Kaufman, Mr. Gondry and Pierre Bismuth; director of photography, Ellen Kuras; edited by Valdis Oskarsdottir; music by Jon Brion; production designer, Dan Leigh; produced by Steve Golin and Anthony Bregman; released by Focus Features. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Jim Carrey (Joel Barish), Kate Winslet (Clementine Kruczynski), Kirsten Dunst (Mary), Mark Ruffalo (Stan), Elijah Wood (Patrick) and Tom Wilkinson (Dr. Howard Mierzwiak).

Correction: March 24, 2004, Wednesday A film review of Michel Gondry's ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'' in Weekend on Friday misspelled the given name of Kirsten Dunst's character, a worker at an outfit that erases memories. It is Mary, not May.

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Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, common sense media reviewers.

Imaginative, loopy romance has mature themes, profanity.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The movie explores the idea that it's better t

In spite of their imperfections and the difficulti

While reliving a memory as a tween, the lead chara

Frequent profanity. "F--k" is used often

One of the lead characters is shown stumbling into

Parents need to know that ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND is a 2004 movie that explores the oft-stated idea that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. There is frequent profanity throughout the film; the F-word, among others, is used quite a bit. Characters are often shown drinking…

Positive Messages

The movie explores the idea that it's better to have loved someone and known all the joy the experience brings -- in spite of the hurt and sorrow that might come with the relationship and the relationship's ending -- than to go through life unscathed without having met that person.

Positive Role Models

In spite of their imperfections and the difficulties in their failing relationship, Joel and Clementine grow to realize that the memories and experiences they shared are important and necessary to who they are as individuals.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

While reliving a memory as a tween, the lead character is caught masturbating by his mother. Characters are shown talking after having sex. Briefly exposed male buttocks.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent profanity. "F--k" is used often. "Bitch," "faggot," "ass," "s--t," "p--sy."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

One of the lead characters is shown stumbling into an apartment after drunkenly driving her boyfriend's car into a fire hydrant. Characters are shown drinking beer and alcohol and acting intoxicated. Early in the movie, a character is shown pouring whiskey into her coffee while in a diner. Characters smoke marijuana; in one scene, a woman is noticeably high and starts babbling uncontrollably in front of her boss. Cigarette smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND is a 2004 movie that explores the oft-stated idea that it is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. There is frequent profanity throughout the film; the F-word, among others, is used quite a bit. Characters are often shown drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and marijuana. In one scene, a woman stumbles into the apartment of her boyfriend after drunkenly driving his car into a fire hydrant. In another scene, a man is arguing with his girlfriend about how he likes to get high on marijuana to balance out being drunk. These scenes, and the general theme of preserving memories in spite of the pain they cause in the aftermath of a failed relationship, make this film best for mature teens and adults. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (16)
• Kids say (29)

Based on 16 parent reviews

Great movie, complicated message and a bit of sex

What's the story.

Joel ( Jim Carrey ) is trying to work through the pain and sorrow of his recently ended relationship with Clementine ( Kate Winslet ). When he realizes that Clementine underwent a procedure to have all her memories of her time with Joel completely removed, he meets with the company that performed the procedure and decides that he wants the exact same thing. But as the process begins, and as he re-experiences these memories he shared with Clementine, he begins to have second thoughts. With Clementine's help, he begins to take control of the memories as a way to try and preserve as much as he can from his time with her, and even as these memories begin to fade away, Clementine and Joel work to figure out a way in which they can meet again, in spite of their clean slates.

Is It Any Good?

This fabulously imaginative and deliciously loopy romance is the sweetest movie yet from the magnificently twisty mind of writer Charlie Kaufman. He plays with the themes of identity, time, memory, and attraction in a slightly off-kilter world that seems oddly home-like and familiar. Shot in a style that is both gritty and dreamy, the movie's insinuatingly casual tone gently nudges the concepts along so it almost begins to make more sense than real life.

Carrey and Winslet risk making their characters as maddening to us as they are to each other and are ultimately as irresistible, too. Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson, and Kirsten Dunst are impeccable, providing a bittersweet counterpoint of imperfection and longing. Director Michel Gondry matches Kaufman's script with understated but brilliantly original imagery of memory and forgetting.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about which memories they might think about erasing and which ones they will always make sure to keep. They might also like to look up the meaning of the word "lacuna," talk about some of their favorite quotations, and read some of the brilliant poetry of Alexander Pope.

How is the nature of memory explored and shown throughout the film? Does the disjointed nature of some of the scenes mirror your own attempts to remember moments from your life?

Did the drug and alcohol use in the movie seem gratuitous or a realistic reflection of what these adult characters did in their lives?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 12, 2004
• On DVD or streaming : September 27, 2004
• Cast : Elijah Wood , Jim Carrey , Kate Winslet
• Director : Michel Gondry
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 110 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language, some drug and sexual content
• Last updated : November 7, 2023

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Movies: Do I Love You? (I Forget)

You are getting a free preview of a TIME Magazine article from our archive . Many of our articles are reserved for subscribers only. Want access to more subscriber-only content, click here to subscribe.

Each love affair is its own life. And whether its span is that of a mayfly or a Galapagos tortoise, it has a life cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decay, death. And possibly rebirth? Or just instant replay?

That’s the question, the double theory, posed in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , the latest and loveliest alternative universe created by Charlie Kaufman, America’s most–we should probably say only–intellectually provocative screenwriter. In Being John Malkovich , Kaufman transposed Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole into a chute that ends in the mind of a movie star. Human Nature had him musing on the internal battle of animal and civilized instincts. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind , he spun trash-game-show king Chuck Barris’ tales of CIA sleuthing and assassination into a deconstruction of the spy-movie and biopic genres. He threw himself (and a fake twin brother) into Adaptation, a film about, among other things, the impossibility of one medium’s being true to another.

Here, working with Human Nature director Michel Gondry, Kaufman wonders whether one person can be true to another, whatever obstacles pile up. On Valentine’s Day 2004, Joel Barish (a wonderfully forlorn Jim Carrey) decides to skip work and–who knows why–take a train to Montauk on the frosty tip of Long Island. There he is accosted by free-spirited Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet, ornery and seductive). She lures mopey Joel into an affair, which proves to have as many abrasive spots as soft ones. Truth to tell, they’re a wildly ill-suited pair. But, hey, bitter with the sweet, eh?

Not in this science-fiction comedy-drama, in which love means never having to remember you were sorry. When Joel learns Clem has had her memory of their affair removed by a Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), he resolves to do the same; why should he suffer remorse when Clem’s slate is clean? So he sticks his head in Dr. M.’s apparatus–an Ed Wood–style space helmet mixed with a hair dryer–but, as his mind swims through the memory-erasure process, he decides that even the rotten memories of Clem are worth treasuring. How to stop all this, escape from Camp Brainwash, especially when the doc’s klutzy technicians (Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst) are more attentive to their own weird erotic vectors than to the fellow whose love affair they are extracting?

For all the twists from memory to fantasy to “reality” (whatever that is in a Charlie Kaufman film) and for all the nods to the memory games played out in the brilliant stories of Philip K. Dick, Eternal Sunshine has a plot propulsion that’s almost Spielbergian in its simplicity. A gentle creature gets lost and must fight to get back home–home here being his mind and his girlfriend, or what’s left of them. The Spielberg movie this one most resembles is Always , in which a dead man tries to reconnect with his surviving wife.

This is a lovesick horror movie, for Dr. M.’s procedure is not a cure but a disease: Alzheimer’s, in which memories are erased in reverse order until only the earliest are retained. And yet as laid out with such elliptical care by Kaufman and Gondry and played by Carrey and Winslet with fiendish devotion to their wayward characters, it’s a horror movie that dares to hope–to hope even for the worst, since the thorniest love makes us feel most alive, even in our misery.

The film says love could be the emotional equivalent of muscle memory; it’s buried so deep that even modern science, or science fiction, can’t reach it. Love isn’t what we remember; it’s what we are. For all the memory Dr. M. extracts from Joel, the doctor neglects to remove his patient’s heart, and that leads the poor sap right back to his unforgettable inamorata. If it’s meant to happen, it will, over and over. You can’t erase destiny.

That’s just one view of an amnesiac romance so rich and demanding, it could mean anything. Kaufman may be counting on the audience’s will, insistence and yearning to create a coherent love story from the shards and shrapnel he provides us. The movie warns, This will be a bumpy ride, steered by two people who can be hard to like, making detours into wormholes, in a plot that laps itself. Care to come along?

And like Joel, with love in his eyes and lust for a strange adventure, I say O.K.

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The Unforgettable ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ Is 20 Years Old

I don’t remember where I first saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . That’s odd; I can usually rattle off exactly where and how I saw my favorite movies. I watched Citizen Kane in the family room of my parents’ old house on a pan-and-scanned VHS tape I rented from Blockbuster Video. I fell in love with Jacques Tati’s Playtime when I saw it projected in a beautiful 70mm print at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I encountered No Country for Old Men for the first time in one of the smaller theaters tucked into a corner of the Palais in Cannes.

While I don’t like it as much as Eternal Sunshine , I can even recall the first time I saw screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ’s feature debut Being John Malkovich — at the old Loews Freehold 6 in New Jersey. Once the top theater in the area where I grew up, by 1999, the Freehold 6 had become a second-run theater on the verge of permanent closure. That place was almost literally falling apart; some of the seats were ripped apart and the ceiling was missing tiles. The staff was so checked out that the first few minutes of Being John Malkovich were projected onto the ceiling until we went out in the lobby and complained.

And yet I don’t remember where I first saw Eternal Sunshine. It came out 20 years ago this spring, when I was living and going to school in New York City. I almost certainly saw it in a Manhattan theater. If I had to, I’d guess it was the Angelika Film Center on Houston. But wherever I saw it, the memory of that screening has been lost to the void, as happens to so many memories naturally over time. In a way, that made me appreciate the film even more than I did in 2004. Part of what is so powerful about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is that it uses a sci-fi premise to consider the implications of natural memory loss, and to allow a character to recognize that implacable loss as it is happening.

READ MORE: The Greatest Films of All Time

That character is Joel, played by Jim Carrey . After an opening sequence that seems like a stereotypical movie meet cute in Montauk, Long Island between Joel and Clementine ( Kate Winslet ), the movie flashes back (although on first viewing, we assume it flashes forward) to Joel’s discovery that his now-ex-girlfriend Clementine used a medical procedure offered by a sketchy company called Lacuna to erase her memory of their relationship. Devastated, Joel decides to undergo the procedure himself.

Much of the rest of the movie follows Joel as he wanders through his own mind and witnesses his relationship with Clementine get systematically erased in reverse, starting with their painful breakup and then winding back through happier times until he arrives at his first meeting with Clementine during a previous chance encounter in Montauk.

Meanwhile, the Lacuna employees erasing Joel’s memories get storylines of their own. These characters and their comical relationship woes keep Eternal Sunshine from becoming too depressing or repetitive, while offering counterpoints to Joel and Clementine’s history. Technician Stan ( Mark Ruffalo ) and receptionist Mary ( Kirsten Dunst ) smoke pot and hook up next to Joel’s unconscious body while their Lacuna machine scrubs his mind. Another young employee named Stan (Elijah Wood) sneaks off his to spend time with his new girlfriend — who happens to be Clementine. Stan has used lines cribbed from notes and cards that Joel handed over to Lacuna as part of the prep for the mind-erasing procedure to win her heart.

Joel’s mental projection inside his mind soon regrets his decision to erase Clementine. So he tries to fight it. He grabs a memory of Clementine and hides her in recollections from before they met. (Some involve Joel as a kid or even a baby, which gives us the uncanny sight of a tiny Jim Carrey getting bathed in a kitchen sink.) Joel causes enough literal headaches for the Lacuna staff that they have to call in the company’s big boss Howard ( Tom Wilkinson ) to get things back on track. (Gradually we learn Howard may be messing with his own employees heads without their realizing it.)

Joel’s efforts delay the procedure but they don’t stop it. That is one of the things that makes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so poignant; Joel’s struggle is a compressed version of each person’s losing battle against time. Eventually, all memories fade. None of us has had Mark Ruffalo erase a relationship from our brain; everyone has bumped into someone they knew in grade school or summer camp and been unable to summon their name. A few hours before I watched Eternal Sunshine at Ebertfest last weekend, I bumped into someone and said “Nice to meet you” — only for them to reply “Oh we met at a festival, probably around seven or eight years ago.” I had absolutely no memory of that. It was awkward.

Joel does save a subliminal shred of Clementine whispering “Meet me in Montauk” from Lacuna’s mental erasure. The morning after his frontal lobe gets scrubbed, Joel impulsively calls out sick to work and hops the Long Island Railroad out to the Hamptons. Somehow, Clementine is there too, and they hit it off again. (This is the same scene that opens the movie, played a second time.)

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman obviously intended these scenes as a wry commentary about the way those who refuse to learn from history (or, in this case, try to intentionally forget) are doomed to repeat it. But Eternal Sunshine invites a more macro (and perhaps more hopeful) reading. Despite Lacuna’s best efforts, Joel and Clementine take the train to Montauk on the same day at the same time, something that feels bigger than a coincidence. While science tries pulls them apart, something larger than science refuses to let that happen. You might even call it fate.

Or maybe it’s just director Michel Gondry. In his breakthrough film, Gondry manages to balance the very mundane world of Joel and Clementine’s relationship — their arguments over nothing, their irritation at each other’s personality quirks — with the futuristic technology of Lacuna and the dreamlike world of Joel’s deteriorating memories. Eternal Sunshine contains some truly impressive visuals, like a Montauk beach house falling into the sea. While the images are surreal, Gondry’s practical approach to effects (they really built part of the house on the beach and then waited for the tide to rise and wash through it) makes these moments seem unreal and tactile all at once. That’s a very difficult combination to pull off, and a very accurate one, at least in my experience, to the way dreams feel while you’re asleep.

Eternal Sunshine would make a great double feature with Inside Out, another funny, entertaining crowdpleaser that is also a deeply melancholy consideration of how our brains evolve and change over time (RIP Bing Bong). Both films also make an insistent plea for the importance of unhappiness in our lives. They suggest ignoring sadness does not make you happy; it actually dampens all your other emotions and keeps you from feeling anything . Only by opening yourself up to the possibility of hurt, as Joel and Clementine do in Eternal Sunshine’s opening and closing scenes, can you also feel true love and joy.

That message made Eternal Sunshine a perfect film to show at Ebertfest in 2024, as the festival founded by the late film critic Roger Ebert celebrated 25 years of existence — and an uncertain future. In her introduction to the fest’s closing night selection, Ebertfest co-founder and producer Chaz Ebert revealed that it is not entirely certain if there will be an Ebertfest in 2025. The festival’s future is up in the air.

I hope that Ebertfest continues; it remains one of the great places to see classic films on the big screen in this country. For four days, hundreds of people come to the Virginia Theatre in Ebert’s hometown of Champaign, Illinois to watch old films on a massive screen. Last weekend, in addition to Eternal Sunshine , I also Andrew Davis’ Stony Island , Robert Altman’s Cookie ’s Fortune , Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon , and a restoration of the early Alfred Hitchcock silent film Blackmail with live music by the Anvil Orchestra.

I attended Ebertfest twice before; once when Roger was still alive, and once right after his passing, when the program, the final one programmed by Ebert himself, was full of movies about mortality and death. Chaz Ebert and her team have done a terrific job continuing Ebertfest’s mission and high level of quality without its namesake. It was just as fun to come to the fest in 2024 as it was in 2011.

I recognize that 25 years is a pretty good run for any film festival — especially one whose original founder and central figure passed away more than a decade ago. If this was the final Ebertfest, then I will hold on to the memories I made there for as long as I can. But I know they will not last forever.

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

• Comedy , Drama , Romance , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

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In Theaters

• Jim Carrey as Joel Barish; Kate Winslet as Clementine Kruczynski; Elijah Wood as Patrick; Mark Ruffalo as Stan; Kirsten Dunst as Mary; Tom Wilkinson as Dr. Howard Mierzwiak

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• Michel Gondry

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• Focus Features

Movie Review

Joel Barish is a scruffy sad sack passively trudging through his mundane life. He lacks vision. He lacks passion. He can’t even make eye contact with women he doesn’t know. Then his lack of spontaneity meets its match in Clementine, a flaky, moody extrovert with a penchant for neon dye jobs. She needs affirmation. She also dwells in constant fear that she’s not living life to the fullest and encourages Joel to take risks. But before we see their relationship blossom, we learn that it’s already over. Two years have passed and Clementine has lost patience with Joel, inspiring her to have portions of her memory erased by Dr. Mierzwiak, a brain surgeon able to isolate undesirable memories and eliminate them.

Joel is crushed and pursues the procedure himself. He wants Clementine excised from his mind. Once sedated, he begins reliving the most recent, most volatile episodes from their relationship first. As the bad times slowly give way to earlier, more hopeful experiences, Joel decides he doesn’t want to let those memories go. He realizes that losing bittersweet memories is more painful than living with them. In a bizarre, dreamlike state, Joel relives highlights from his romance with “Clem” and tries to elude the surreal, memory-zapping efforts of Dr. Mierzwiak and his assistants, Patrick, Stan and Mary.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is basically a love story in reverse—a point subtly reinforced by portions of the soundtrack, which are musical scores played backwards. It’s a mind-bending journey written by Charlie Kaufman, best known for his work on other offbeat films such as Adaptation, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Being John Malkovich .

Positive Elements

Joel chastises Clem for driving under the influence of alcohol, pointing out that her irresponsibility could have killed someone. The film suggests that adultery is damaging to everyone involved. Dr. Mierzwiak points out that a night of heavy drinking causes minor brain damage. When Joel and Clem listen in on the malicious remarks each had recorded about the other, it illustrates how devastating unkind words can be and the need to tame the tongue (James 3).

Spiritual Elements

Mary quotes existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (“Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders”) and neoclassicist poet Alexander Pope from his lovelorn work “Eloisa to Abelard” (“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind; each prayer accepted and each wish resigned”). There’s a fatalistic tone to the film as a whole as people who have their memories erased appear doomed to repeat the same mistakes. An episode of TV’s The Munsters plays in the background of one scene, during which Grandpa consults a book of magic potions and can be heard concocting one.

Sexual Content

Retreating into an embarrassing memory from childhood, Joel is shown masturbating to a pornographic comic book. Stan and Mary strip to their briefs and dance around before having sex (the act itself isn’t shown; afterward they cuddle wrapped only in a blanket). There’s brief rear male nudity. Joel speaks of having lived with his previous girlfriend, and shares an apartment with Clem. They talk and kiss in bed. Joel grabs Clem’s breasts and backside. There are several shots of her in her underwear. Clem is extremely forward and sexually aggressive, leading Joel to wonder who else she might be sleeping with. He accuses Clem of being promiscuous because that’s how she gets people to like her. In fact, the day they meet she jokes about seducing him. [ Spoiler Warning ] Mary kisses the married Dr. Mierzwiak, and learns that the two of them had carried on an affair before her memory of that indiscretion was erased. Patrick kisses Clem.

Violent Content

As children, bullies force Joel to pound a small animal with a hammer. The doctor’s wife slugs Stan. Joel and Clem pretend to suffocate one another with a pillow.

Crude or Profane Language

There’s a lot of harsh language, most notably 25 f-words, 35 misuses of God’s name (including 15 of “Jesus” and/or “Christ”), and more than a dozen s-words.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Clem is a lush. She spikes her morning coffee, drinks beer, asks for whiskey, raids a stranger’s liquor cabinet and damages Joel’s car while driving drunk. Upon meeting Joel, she invites him up to her place for a drink and jokes that being tipsy “makes the whole seduction part less repugnant.” Stan and Patrick consume beer. Stan and Mary smoke marijuana and she gets stoned (after drinking alcohol). Characters drag on cigarettes. Joel’s brother-in-law, Rob, offers him a joint. Rob argues that it’s okay to drive after smoking pot. Joel takes a prescription drug that knocks him out, and later gets injected with another sedative.

Other Negative Elements

Patrick acts unethically by using information about Joel’s romantic history to try to seduce Clem.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a fascinatingly unique love story. Unlike tales told chronologically, it actually begins at the point of greatest conflict—where Joel and Clem are fed up with each other and she’s ready to split. Scenes proceed to walk the audience through the romance in reverse, offering insight into how the couple arrived at that place. It gradually moves away from anger and relational fatigue toward the sweet, awkward idealism that landed these unstable people together in the first place. Then they get a chance to start fresh. A clean slate. Furthermore, a bizarre twist gives them a glimpse of the hostile end their relationship will face if it plays out the way it did the first time.

It could’ve been the set-up for a great lesson about romantic pitfalls and how to build a healthy, lasting marriage. Imagine two disturbed people who boldly decide to redeem their second chance. To improve their relationship. To refine communication skills. To become other-oriented. To hone character. To actually commit for a lifetime.

But no, the existential worldview driving the film is more fatalistic and amoral than that. In the closing moments, Joel and Clem seem resigned to the fact that their union is doomed. They’re considered noble for their willingness to pursue whatever fun they can (including sex) before the whole thing goes down the toilet. All that matters is creating memories. So … then what? On to the next relational train wreck? That’s perfectly honorable as far as Kaufman and director Michel Gondry are concerned.

To suggest that individuals can improve themselves or their relationship for the purpose of life-long fidelity and true intimacy would be to impose a moral standard. It would imply that certain attitudes or lifestyles are better than others—or at least more functional. A notion Kaufman quashes: “I refuse to put a moral on it.”

At an even deeper level, this sentimental, yet cynical film seems to question a person’s ability to change. The Bible is clear that people can evolve. So can circumstances. We are not slaves to a predestined future, but shape our tomorrows with the choices we make today. The key is to understand our fallen nature and work to overcome it with God’s help. That requires effort. Selflessness. Integrity. The kind of love described in 1 Corinthians 13. Sadly, the minds behind Eternal Sunshine eschew absolutes and embrace relativism. They esteem Nietzsche and profane the name of Christ. So maybe we shouldn’t marvel that the best Joel and Clem can hope to do is live in the moment and grab a little sunshine before it inevitably disappears over the horizon.

If the existentialists are to be believed, the couple’s relationship is a microcosm of life itself and the memories we make are all we really have. Christians know better. Despite some comical moments, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a sad, surreal drama about two lost souls who find in each other nothing more than a temporary high.

Bob Smithouser

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• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

"S and is overrated," murmurs Joel, the hero of this comedy, who's goofed off work for the day to mope around the beach. "It's just ... tiny little rocks." That slacker epiphany could only have come from the pen of Charlie Kaufman, creator of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and one of the very few screenwriters in Hollywood - perhaps the only screenwriter - whose authorial identity supersedes the director's. In this case, it is Michel Gondry, who also directed Kaufman's ape comedy, Human Nature.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is suffused with Kaufman's unique charm, his existential drollery, his humane affection for the lonely and vulnerable. It's a very Kaufmanesque narrative experiment, technically ingenious and sophisticated. It also looks like some lost comedy idea by Philip K Dick; you could call this film We Can Forget It for You Retail. But it is also overcooked and frenetic, with some visual tricks and gimmicks repeated often enough to induce a diminishing return of novelty and effect.

As in Adaptation, Kaufman has a depressed creative guy experiencing a nagging anxiety about the meaning of life. Like Nicolas Cage in that film, he begins with a panicky, whispery voice-over about what the point of it all is, worrying away at his own discontents, which float meaninglessly out into the colossal placidity of the universe. He is Joel, played by Jim Carrey: a semi- employed cartoonist and graphic artist. One day he bumps into a beautiful young woman with dyed hair. Clementine (Kate Winslet) is a beguiling force of nature and poor introverted Joel falls hopelessly in love with her. But then we cut to another, calamitous stage in their relationship. After their affair has gone sour, Joel finds Clementine is blanking him when they meet; it's as if they've never known each other.

Then he finds out the awful truth. Clementine has had him erased from her memory by an experimental hi-tech firm wittily called Lacuna, which, despite the sensational service it offers, operates out of a bizarrely down-at-heel office almost as tatty as the one which had the portal into Malkovich's brain. Here chief scientist Dr Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) with his geeky assistants played by Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Kirsten Dunst, have painful memories lasered out of their unhappy clients' grey matter, and in a rage Joel demands that they perform the same service on him to forget Clementine. But he finds that he is strangely reluctant to relinquish his memories of the woman he loved, no matter how unbearably painful they are.

It's a theme which Kaufman extends and syncopates with oodles of clever material. "Will this procedure cause brain damage?" asks Joel as the helmet is lowered on to his skull. "Technically," says Wilkinson gravely, "this procedure is brain damage." Literary allusions rattle amiably around. The title is taken from Pope, and Dr Mierzwiak's staff are enamoured of Nietzsche's paradoxes about how the strong man forgets what he cannot master: "Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders." Mierzwiak's secretary is called Mary Svevo, a surname which recalls Zeno's Conscience by her namesake Italo, about a psychoanalyst who frustrates his patient's need to abandon the past.

Moving on, getting closure, that is what the end of relationships is supposed to be all about. Not dwelling or brooding or obsessing about why someone fell out of love with you. In the absence of marriage for life, serial monogamy is what people expect, and so they must cultivate the art of forgetting if these transitions are to be managed. But oblivion offers peace at the cost of self-destruction, and Joel passionately feels that his unhappiness over Clem is part of his identity. Oddly, one literary allusion that Kaufman doesn't turn up is Proust, whose narrator is told by Swann that should he move to a paradisiacal Pacific island, he would forget all about Paris. That may be so, but it is frightening to imagine a future in which our current happinesses and unhappinesses will no longer exist.

Gondry keeps a tight rein on Carrey, who gives one of his most digestible performances in ages. But the director always insists on an excess of surreality by pedantically realising visually every strange detail of Joel's memory-angst. If he's thinking about a bookstore while pacing about an apartment, we see the bookstore in the apartment. If he's thinking about them on the beach while lying in bed, then we see them lying on a bed on the beach. All very wacky and Dick Lester-ish, like a grad-school Beatles movie, and for about five or ten minutes it's funny and exhilarating. But it's over-extended, and tends to undermine the rigorous realism which made the idea funny.

The resolution Kaufman offers reveals that, apart from everything else, there has been some playful jiggery-pokery in the time scheme and he follows this up with a further plot twist which, having appeared to restore Joel and Clementine's happiness, puts it in peril once again. It's something which shows that for all his Lewis Carroll waywardness, there is something toughly real about this writer's world-view. I wish that some more tactful and less wired direction had been brought to his eccentric and delicate love story.

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You can erase someone from your mind. Getting them out of your heart is another story.

Joel Barish, heartbroken that his girlfriend underwent a procedure to erase him from her memory, decides to do the same. However, as he watches his memories of her fade away, he realises that he still loves her, and may be too late to correct his mistake.

Michel Gondry

Director, Story

Charlie Kaufman

Screenplay, Story

Pierre Bismuth

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Joel Barish

Kate Winslet

Clementine Kruczynski

Kirsten Dunst

Mark Ruffalo

Elijah Wood

Tom Wilkinson

Dr. Howard Mierzwiak

Carrie Eakin

David Cross

Deirdre O'Connell

Hollis Mierzwiak

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A review by Wuchak

Written by wuchak on november 20, 2019.

Inventive drama/romance with Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet and so much more

A man (Jim Carrey) discovers that his babe (Kate Winslet) had her memory of their relationship removed via the medical procedures of an innovative company. He decides to get the surgery as well, but as the technicians (Mark Ruffalo & Elijah Wood) conduct the procedure he changes his mind! Can he escape with his memory intact and possibly save the relationship? Tom Wilkinson plays the doctor and Kirsten Dunst the secretary.

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004) is a drama/sci-fi/romance hybrid that’s... read the rest.

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Original Language English

Budget $20,000,000.00

Revenue $72,258,126.00

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Bring back some good or bad memories, may 1, 2024, polaroids of jim carrey and kate winslet from the set of “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind” (2004).

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

• When their relationship turns sour, a couple undergoes a medical procedure to have each other erased from their memories forever.
• Much to his surprise, timid Joel Barish is shocked to discover that the love of his life, sparky Clementine, has had him erased from her memory. As a result, hurt and angry, Joel wants to pay her back in the same coin, going as far as to undergo a painless but intricate medical procedure to do the same. However, poor Joel is utterly unaware that darkness is an essential part of the light. And as the once-cherished recollections of Clementine gradually fade away, giving way to a soulless black void, something unexpected happens. Now Joel has second thoughts, toying with the idea of stopping the irreversible process. Who said ignorance is bliss? — Nick Riganas
• A man awakes disheveled; impulsively, he skips work, heading instead to the shore. On this chilly February day, a woman in orange, hair dyed blue, chats him up: she's Clementine, he's Joel, shy and sad; by day's end, he likes her. The next night she takes him to the frozen Charles River. After, as he drops her off, she asks to sleep at his place, and she runs up to get her toothbrush. Strange things occur: their meeting was not entirely chance, they have a history neither remembers. Our seeing how the lacunae came to be and their discovery of the memory loss take the rest of the film. — <[email protected]>
• Joel is stunned to discover that his girlfriend Clementine has had her memories of their tumultuous relationship erased. Out of desperation, he contracts the inventor of the process, Dr. Howard Mierzwaik, to have Clementine removed from his own memory. But as Joel's memories progressively disappear, he begins to rediscover their earlier passion. From deep within the recesses of his brain, Joel attempts to escape the procedure. As Dr. Mierzwiak and his crew chase him through the maze of his memories, it's clear that Joel just can't get her out of his head. — Focus Features
• This is the story of a guy, Joel, who discovers that his long-time girlfriend, Clementine, has undergone a psychiatrist's experimental procedure in which all of her memory of Joel is removed, after the couple has tried for years to get their relationship working fluidly. Frustrated by the idea of still being in love with a woman who doesn't remember their time together, Joel agrees to undergo the procedure as well, to erase his memories of Clementine. — [email protected]
• Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) is an emotionally withdrawn man and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) is his girlfriend who is a dysfunctional free spirit. They are inexplicably attracted to each other despite their different personalities. They do not realize it at the time, but they are former lovers now separated after two years together. After a nasty fight, Clementine has had her memories of their relationship erased from her mind. Upon learning this, Joel is devastated and goes to the doctor to have the same procedure done. However, while unconscious, Joel has second thoughts and decides he wants to keep his memories of Clementine. Much of the film takes place in Joel's brain as he tries to find a way to preserve his memories of Clementine, and two Lacuna techies Patrick (Elijah Wood) and Stan (Mark Ruffalo) try to erase the memories. We watch their love and courtship go in reverse: The memories are slowly erased while Joel tries his best to resist the procedure and hide inside his mind. In separate and related story arcs, the employees of Lacuna Corporation are revealed to be more than peripheral characters in scenes which further show the harm caused by the memory-altering procedure. Mary (Kirsten Dunst) has had an affair with the married Dr. Howard Mierzwiak, who heads the company (Tom Wilkinson). She agreed to have the affair erased from her memory when his wife discovered the relationship. Lonely, socially inept Patrick becomes fixated on Clementine and uses Joel's personal mementos that he gave to Lacuna as part of the procedure in order to seduce her. These romantic entanglements turn out to have a critical effect on the main story line of the relationship between Joel and Clementine. Once Mary learns of the affair she has had with Mierzwiak, she steals the company's records and sends them to all of its clients. Thus Joel and Clementine both get to listen to their initial tape recordings at Lacuna, and afterwards realize that even if everything in life isn't perfect, their relationship can still be worthwhile.

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‘eternal sunshine’ Album Review: A Familiar Reverie

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“Eternal sunshine” is Ariana Grande’s highly anticipated seventh studio album, released on March 8. While the album is not groundbreaking and feels somewhat typical for Grande, her elevated lyricism combined with cohesive production creates an emotional and exciting listening experience. “Eternal sunshine” is a shorter album than Grande’s previous work like “Positions” or “Dangerous Woman”, yet each track feels intentional and adds something new to the experience. Ariana leads listeners to dance, cry, and reflect — sometimes all at the same time. “Eternal sunshine” features Grande’s expected stunning vocals and pop production, and while far from revolutionary, Grande has clearly elevated her musical and lyrical depth with her new album.

“Eternal sunshine” is not a homogenous album, featuring clean transitions and cohesive production that feels highly intentional. The lead single “yes, and?” features an EDM/house-inspired beat behind her typical pop vocals and lyrics. The single surprised listeners and led many to believe the album would follow suit. However, when listening to the album in totality, “yes, and?” feels like an outlier in comparison to the more melodic tracks. Additionally, “true story” features a rather R&B-influenced background track that serves as a refreshing break from the heavy pop instrumentals. Despite the two rather unique sounding tracks, “eternal sunshine” has strong ties to her previous album “Sweetener,” featuring similar dream-like sounds and staying well within the pop genre.

While it may be difficult to make generalizations about this thematically diverse album, Grande reflects on current and previous relationships, opening up about the difficulty she faces protecting her feelings. In the well-loved track “i wish i hated you”, she draws on the relatable experience of the disparities between how one wants to feel versus how one truly feels. Grande states, “No matter how easy things could be if I did / And no matter how guilty I still feel saying it / I wish I hated you.” Furthermore, in the second chorus, listeners are able to hear her voice crack and sniffle which one can assume is Grande crying while singing. Rarely heard in mainstream music, this raw vocal decision truly stands out and adds to the depth and honesty Grande conveys throughout the song and album.

“Saturn Returns Interlude” is an atmospheric and dynamic moment that leads into the introspective title track. Almost like someone trying to wake Grande up from a trance, the interlude serves as a turning point in the album. Voiced by Diana Garland, the lyrics “it’s time for you to get real about life / and sort out who you really are / wake up,” demonstrate how Grande realized she needs to become more realistic in her life and relationships.

Drawing on the interlude, the title track of the album “eternal sunshine” is a reference to the popular movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which focuses on the power of memory — battling between erasure and acceptance of the past. With the lyrics “I found a good boy and he’s on my side / You’re just my eternal sunshine,” Grande suggests that despite the pain, she grew from her previous relationship and values the lessons she learned.

In divergence from the introspective songs, “eternal sunshine” also features upbeat tracks that balance fun and danceability through its bold lyrics and fresh production style. In the prideful and outright fun track “bye,” Grande reflects on the end of her relationship and talks about learning from her loved ones after parting ways with the past. Furthermore, in the lead single “yes, and?,” Grande undoubtedly expresses her growth in a self affirming mindset — being unapologetic about her decisions despite external opinions. With lyrics such as “Now, I’m so done with caring / What you think, no I won’t hide/ Underneath your own projections / Or change my most authentic life,” Grande makes it clear she is done trying to please others. While the heavier songs shine more than the more light-hearted songs, Grande plays into a diverse range of energy levels that adds depth to the album.

“Eternal sunshine” feels like a breath of fresh air and is reminiscent of waking up from a dream, as Grande delivers a sonically cohesive album that may not feel brand new but is far from sounding tired. While there are certainly high energy portions of the album, the delicate and emotional moments truly shine and make this work a standout album. Grande touches on themes of self acceptance, reflects on previous relationships, and leads listeners through an emotional journey from dance breaks to crying sessions. Grande’s newest album “eternal sunshine” may feel familiar but is undoubtedly elevated from previous work in terms of lyrics, production, and depth.

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