Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind DVD > Reviews > Kaufman's Best

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Loved it
Story	Outstanding
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Outstanding
How does it compare to similar films?	Outstanding

Advantages:	Different, imaginative, satisfyingly ambiguous, visually inventive .
Disadvantages:	It's not what the trailer leads you to expect

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

It is a rare thing for a writer, rather than a director or an actor, to forge such a reputation that his or her name alone is enough to make people go and see a film, but such is the case with Charlie Kaufman. The author of the screenplays for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation once again takes us on an inventive and imaginative ride, but this time he manages to finish the story as strongly as he starts, which together with the inventive direction by feature film newcomer Michel Gondry makes this by far the most satisfying of his films to date.

Eternal Sunshine is the story of Joel (Jim Carrey), a shy man lacking in confidence with women who never does anything spontaneous. Until, that is, one morning he abandons waiting for his train to work and instead heads to the beach. There he encounters Clementine (Kate Winslet), a blue-haired woman with no compunctions about approaching strangers and starting conversations, and the two of them hit it off. The film jumps in a confusingly random way and Joel is discovering that Clementine has not only dumped him, but had all memory of him and their relationship wiped from her mind. This turns out to be a service offered by Lacuna Inc, a small company run by Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), who Joel then enlists to perform the same process on himself. As Lacuna employees Patrick (Elijah Wood) and Stan (Mark Ruffalo) go to work on Joel, with Mary (Kirsten Dunst) looking on, things start to go wrong, it seems Joel's subconscious is rebelling against the erasure being performed.

People who have seen the trailer for Eternal Sunshine, and there will not be many regular cinema goers who managed to avoid it, will probably be expecting an upbeat fast snappy funny quirky film. It comes as quite a surprise to find that, though undeniably quirky and with some very funny moments, this is actually quite a dark exploration of a relationship falling apart. Where in some films the central concept of watching someone revisiting their own memories would become the main driving force behind the film, here it is just used an imaginative tool for showing just how things between Joel and Clementine went wrong, but also that plenty of good stuff happened along the way.

This restraint is what raises Eternal Sunshine above the other Kaufman films, yes it is based around a very clever idea but that clever idea never dominates the story, it is merely used in its service. A similar restraint is shown in the use of special effects. Often a new director, especially one from the world of music videos, will go visually over the top in an effort to impress, but again the effects on show are not flashy and in your face, on the contrary they are so subtle that sometimes you are not quite sure what you did or didn't see, something which matches perfectly with the fickleness of fading memories. Repeated viewings could well be satisfying as you notice more of these small background touches.

Jim Carey shows once more that he is capable of far more than the facial goofing off that made him famous, though he does get one or two chances to show off those talents as well. Kate Winslet is as watchable as ever as the compellingly impulsive but flawed Clementine. That the supporting cast includes the likes of Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Kirsten Dunst just goes to show how eager actors are to get to work on a Kaufman film.

What really makes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind work is the balance given to its various parts and the intelligence with which the main theme is explored. There are plenty of moments of humour, but also as many of heartbreak, the madcap visualisation of Joel's search through his memories for hiding places is intercut with the real world goings on in his bedroom as the Lacuna employees struggle to complete there procedure, and the utterly confusing way the film opens, leaving you at a loss as to just what is going on, resolves into an extremely satisfying ending as everything slots together with only the right sort of ambiguity left at the end for the viewer to make their own mind up about.

The biggest complaint I can think of is that the trailer was quite so misleading, and it is a shame that some people would probably not give the film a chance once it became clear that it was not the quirky fun comedy that the trailer makes it out to be. As complaints go, this is pretty minor, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film well worth seeing.