Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

rating: ****

the story: A depressed man learns his ex deleted all her memories of their relationship, and so he resolves to do the same.

what it's all about: Jim Carrey is one of my favorite actors, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of his most critically acclaimed films.  So why have I struggled with it for fourteen years?

Carrey became famous after making films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb & Dumber.  He transitioned into surrealist comedy with The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, although they could just as easily be described as existentialist.  Eternal Sunshine was the next evolution from that, and he was never able to go further than that, with the closest being The Number 23, where he played someone with memory issues and an identity crisis.  Again, all this because he became uniquely suited to embodying characters well beyond the societal norm, in a mostly humorous fashion. 

Eternal Sunshine presents itself as something of a riddle.  Mindful viewers will know that we begin actually at the end, and then rewind back to the circumstances that immediately preceded it (my summary), and then dive into his memories as they're being erased.  Carrey begins to outrun the erasure, which provides the most amusing elements of the movie.  But ultimately he can't, and his memory is wiped, and...he meets Kate Winslet, again, for the first time, just as we see in the beginning. 

The whole thing becomes a meditation on the stresses of a relationship, and what will or will not, given a few variables, be deal-breakers.  It's kind of (500) Days of Summer before (500) Days of Summer, with a more hopeful, if ambiguous, ending.

So why have I so long had a nagging problem with it?  Well, for one the Jim Carrey who shows up in it, for long stretches at a time, isn't a familiar Jim Carrey at all.  It's not that he's unidentifiable, but that he's so low-key it can be difficult to remember why he was cast.  And then the sequences where he does resemble Jim Carrey...seem out of place. 

Basically, is this a movie that's weird for the sake of being weird?

It feels like someone's idea of what happens if we turn Truman Show up a notch.  Carrey experiences the erasures as if he knows they're happening, and comments on them, and even interacts with the technicians, to a certain extent, while they're working on him.  All this makes for fascinating viewing, but it can also feel artificial, a movie rather than an experience, and yet the whole point of seeing what amounts to an idea of the "real" Carrey, the one who doesn't need to perform all the time, contradicts this.  Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter known for this kind of material, at least showed restraint previously.  Nicolas Cage talks with himself, Kaufman's imaginary twin brother, throughout Adaptation.  Most of Being John Malkovich is spent with the people using John as a glorified puppet.  The lines are too blurred in Eternal Sunshine. 

That's not to say the individual elements don't work in and of themselves.  The technicians are played by Tom Wilkinson, who leads the team, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Elijah Wood.  These are all reliable actors; only Wood is playing against type, which is something he was desperately pursuing in the years following Lord of the Rings.  But he still feels natural.  We learn, eventually, that Dunst once had an affair with Wilkinson, but her memories of it were erased.  Like Ozymandias's supposed brilliant plan in Watchmen, the effects of the erasures aren't as binding as they seem.  If you're attracted to someone, you're attracted to someone. 

The object lesson is the ability to cope rather than hide from heartbreak.  Wilkinson's wife comes closest, briefly though we see her, exasperated though she is, breaking the news to Dunst.  At least she doesn't try to hide from it.  She's the most rational person in the whole movie. 

In the end, I suppose, this is the kind of story that can't have proper resolution, and so it's the ideas that are supposed to be its effect.  It leaves one unsettled because life is messy.  In that regard it's as successful a movie as there ever was.

But darn it, it's still weird not to be satisfied, from a movie starring Jim Carrey.  This is the guy who made a modern Frank Capra (The Majestic).  He may not be downright sappy, but he usually has more concrete things to say, even when exploring the life of a different Kaufman (Andy), who may or may not have faked his own death as his last and greatest prank on the world. 

Oh well, there can always be exceptions.