“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004) is an ingenious and bittersweet hybrid of science fiction, fantasy, comedy and drama starring Jim Carrey as Joel Barish, a mild-mannered Long Island resident who chooses to have his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) deleted entirely from his memory.
First encountering Celmentine on a Long Island Rail Road train, Joel is strangely drawn to the eccentric and extroverted young woman despite the dramatic disparity in their personalities. The fractured narrative of the storyline then flashes forward to the ultimate downfall of their relationship, with Joel learning that Clementine has successfully had all memory of him purged by an agency that specializes in memory extraction. Infuriated by this discovery, Joel immediately signs on for an identical procedure in an emotionally-charged act of reprisal.
As memory removal specialists Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Eijah Wood) proceed with the cutting edge excision, Joel begins to relive his relationship with Clementine in reverse-chronological order, progressing from recent bouts of dispute through to earlier stages of intimacy. Soon realizing his grievous error in initiating the procedure, Joel finds himself on-the-run within his own mind, ushering his memory-likeness of Clementine through unrelated childhood memories in a desperate attempt to evade the removal process and preserve his reawakened appreciation for his beloved companion.
Written by Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich”, “Adaptation.”) and directed by French filmmaker Michel Gondry (“Human Nature, “The Science of Sleep”), “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a dazzling, thought-provoking and highly affecting creation that touches nicely on the complexities of human relations through the prism of a highly innovative fantasy framework. Carey and Winslet both lend wonderfully humane and tender performances to the proceedings, helping to deliver a strikingly original, surrealistic odyssey through a fractured mosaic of memory, emotion and human existence.
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