Directed by Michel Gondry
Written by Charlie Kaufman
Released March 2004
Viewed December 26, 2010
Joel (Jim Carrey) meets Clementine (Kate Winslet). They fall in love. Then it goes sour. Kate goes to a joint that erases specific parts of people’s memories and has Joel erased from hers. Hurt by this, Joel goes to have the same thing done to him. However, as his memory is being erased, he realizes how valuable his memories and relationship with Clementine were, and he tries to fight back against the procedure.
We watched this because we have been developing a substantial appreciation for Charlie Kaufman. We had previously avoided watching it due to 
Jim Carrey playing the starring role. It’s hard to say what is bothersome about Jim Carrey. It has nothing to do with his acting. Rather, it has to do with him as a celebrity. He is loud and annoying and makes strange faces that somehow are supposed to mean something to an audience. Moreover, it didn’t seem possible for him to go an entire movie without making any stupid faces. However, he did, and all things considered, he did an admirable job in Eternal Sunshine.
Nevertheless, this movie wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. The premise for the movie was inspired, as was the way the story was laid out. It just didn’t follow through particularly well, or at least as well as it might have. This was very much a character-based movie. In order to get into the movie, one had to be into the characters. From the beginning, Joel was presented as tight, closed off and shy. Meanwhile, Clementine was impulsive, loose, and open. This was a one-dimensional picture, which, at the beginning, was acceptable. The problem was these characterizations were never developed. The story kept hammering home—in a ham-handed and obvious way—that Joel was closed off and Clementine was impulsive. There was never anything more than that to either of the protagonists. It was almost TV-ish in its one-dimensional portrayal. The romance aspect of it was nice, but a romance of two cardboard characters can only take one so far.
Complicating that was a general dislike of all the peripheral characters. Charlie Kaufman tends to have characters of whom he makes sure to put a spotlight on their negative characteristics yet normally, those characters still don’t come off as completely unsympathetic. In this case, the minor characters of Mary (Kirsten Dunst), and Patrick (Elijah Wood)—who were employees at the memory erasure joint—were only annoying and simplistic. Along those same lines, it seemed their only purpose in the story was to—again hamhandedly—push along the central story of Joel and Clementine.
More than anything else, the director wasn’t up to the project, as Kaufman scripts tend to be a bit complex. I have seen another movie directed by Michael Gondry—Be Kind Rewind. Like Eternal Sunshine, that movie had a spark of brilliance, but it was shrouded in a cloak of mediocrity. I know nothing of Gondry, other than that he is French, but perhaps he is a Blockbuster director who tries to go beyond his inherent limitations. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
It also brings into question who would want entire parts of their memory erased? While this didn’t color the quality of the movie any which way, it seems silly to regret things you do or relationships you’ve had. The experience and knowledge one gains from those things makes one who he is. Unless one would rather have never lived in the first place, there is no reason for it.
In conclusion, I didn’t dislike Eternal Sunshine. My problem was that A) it could have been better than it was, B) some of the characters were mildly (and unintentionally) annoying and C) A lot of people thought it was heavy stuff; what I call depth for the shallow, which I ascribe to Tim Burton movies. Not bad, but hardly mind-blowers.
Ten Ground and Down 