It’s easy to forget how good ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ is
The Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman collaboration turns 20 this month
Note: Spoilers for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The movies don’t change, but we sure do.
Almost exactly 20 years ago, I sat in a theater on a weekday afternoon, convinced that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was the greatest movie I’d ever seen. An inventive and playful examination of memory and relationships, the combination of Charlie Kaufman’s clever screenwriting and director Michel Gondry’s hand-crafted whimsy immediately captured me.
I was single at that time, and a hopeless romantic. During the final scene, when Joel and Clementine stand in the hallway, aware they had a previous relationship neither can remember and willing to give it another go, I was deeply moved. Here, I thought, was a movie that fully believed in the power of love to push through our failures, an ode to trying again, embracing hardship and following your heart.
Twenty years and several viewings later, Kaufman’s screenplay still surprises and provokes, and the cast grounds material that could easily alienate audiences. But with age comes perspective shifts, and I no longer see Eternal Sunshine as a celebration of love persevering; instead, it’s something more complex, thrumming with a tension that makes it more emotionally fraught and, as a result, more fascinating.
Breakups and intentional brain damage
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind first appears to be a quirky, downbeat indie romance. Joel (Jim Carrey) wakes up in his bed on Valentine’s Day and abruptly decides to call off work and drive out to Montauk. He’s in a funk; his car has been mysteriously wrecked and his voiceover tells us that he’s lonely and so despondent that he hasn’t written in his journal in two years. While at the beach, he meets a young woman with bright blue hair. On the train ride back to the city, she introduces herself as Clementine (Kate Winslet). Although their flirtation begins awkwardly, by the end of the night, Clementine and Joel are openly interested in each other, and they go out the next evening to stare at the stars on a frozen river.
But then the film makes an abrupt cut to Joel in his car, sobbing. He heads back to his apartment and deals with awkward small talk with his neighbor about his Valentine’s Day plans. Inside his apartment, he takes some pills and gets into his pajamas, and shortly after he falls asleep, two technicians (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood) enter and begin a mysterious process. From there, we enter parallel timeframes: the two men are technicians at Lacuna, a company that has pioneered a process to erase painful memories. Throughout the night, they will attempt to erase Clementine from Joel’s brain, assisted at times by Lacuna’s receptionist, Mary (Kirsten Dunst), and Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), the doctor who created the process. The majority of the film takes place in Joel’s head as Clementine is surgically deleted, starting with Joel’s first visit to Mierzwiak’s office before showing us the dissolution of the relationship and moving backwards to happier times.
It’s a brilliant construction that allows the film to quickly establish the pseudoscience at the heart of the story and provide a unique entry into Joel and Clementine’s relationship. We quickly view a caustic, antagonistic dynamic between the two; Clementine drinks too much and is impulsive, while Joel just wants to stay home. She wants to have kids; he doesn’t think she’s ready. They sit in silence over dinner, with Joel inwardly lamenting that they are the “dining dead.” It’s easy to see why he would want to erase this relationship from his memory – until he’s given a glimpse of one particularly happy moment he doesn’t want to lose, sending Joel scrambling to hide Clementine in the recesses of his mind and creating one of the most unique chases I’ve seen.
When I first saw Eternal Sunshine, I was most impressed by Carrey’s subdued performance and thought Winslet was fine but unremarkable. Two decades later, my biggest shift might be how I’ve reversed my position. It’s easy to see why I was so surprised by Carrey’s work: he inverts his most manic and over-the-top tendencies to create a character who is insecure, adrift and filled with self-loathing. It’s not that this was Carrey’s first dramatic performance; by this point, he’d already starred in The Truman Show, Man on the Moon and The Majestic. But those each required a bit of Carrey’s silliness and likability; Joel is all angst and despondency. It was a side of Carrey we hadn’t seen before.
And I don’t think he’s bad. He’s effective, and his willingness to pivot with the story’s weirdness helps in the film’s most surreal moments – as when Joel remembers being a baby bathed in a sink. But Joel is such a sad sack – which, admittedly, is in line with him being a Kaufman character – that you can almost see Carrey trying to act more depressed in every scene. There’s a calculation to it, and I wonder what a more natural dramatic actor could have done with this role. Again, I don’t think Carrey’s bad; I just think he’s the one person in the film who you can see working.
My initial frustration with Winslet was just the opposite; I couldn’t understand quite why the multi-Oscar nominee took on a role that, at the time, seemed to me like it was such a typical rom-com character, another manifestation of Nathan Rabin’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl, complete with the hair color that changed to suit her mood.
But watching it again, this might be one of my favorite Winslet performances. Yes, Clementine is a character of extreme emotions and impulsiveness, the type of character who seems designed only to jolt a wet blanket like Joel to life. But watching it again, it’s amazing how much nuance Winslet brings, especially when you consider that we’re actually seeing two different characters. In Joel’s head, we get the Clementine that he remembers, the one whose quirkiness is the most adorable and anger the most vitriolic, who he remembers as his emotions dictate (I’m curious what a movie might look like that takes place in Clementine’s head as she prunes Joel away). In these moments, she’s basically a figment of his imagination, and bitchy, adorable or fawning as Joel’s memory and feelings recall. But Winslet creates Clementine as a more complex, troubled and grounded character in the “real-world” situations as she deals with the emotional fallout of having her memories erased, even though she doesn’t know what has happened.
It’s a performance that is more complex than I initially gave it credit for, and Winslet navigates it superbly. Clementine feels natural, funny and complicated; yes, she’s a heightened version in Joel’s memories, but the “real” version Winslet creates suggests a character who could go to those extremes. It’s easy to see why Joel would think this person would be his one chance at happiness, even on first meeting; it’s also easy to see why her impulsivity and self-destructive tendencies might make a long-term relationship untenable with the milquetoast, cautious Joel.
An ethical minefield (mindfield?)
The more I watch the film, the more I think I might like the subplot about the Lacuna employees even more. If the scenes inside Joel’s mind represent the movie at its fantastical, these sequences are its nerdy, sci-fi heart, and they allow Kaufman and Gondry to deal with the moral and ethical implications of this concept. I particularly like Ruffalo’s nerdiness; he’s the tech dork who is talented but also in a bit over his head – especially when he’s distracted by whiskey, pot and an attractive girl. Ruffalo’s brings a strange combination of dorky coolness that helps the character to be more than just a stereotypical IT nerd.
Wood is really funny as the nerd who fell in love with Clementine during her erasure procedure and is now using all the material Joel gave Lacuna to manipulate her. His character is a worm, but Wood to plays him as pathetic rather than skeezy; there’s the sense that he’s constructing this whole scheme because he knows he can’t win anyone by being himself. The words that sound sincere and romantic coming from Joel sound off-putting and empty out of Wood’s mouth, suggesting that perhaps Joel and Clementine are meant to be together (or not; again, more on that later). And Wilkinson could play compassionate and wise better than almost anyone. He’s really good as Mierzwiak; when it’s revealed that he previously had been in a relationship with Mary and convinced her to erase her memories of their affair to save his marriage, Wilkinson almost convinces you that he is much more noble than the gaslighter he is revealed to be.
Which makes Kirsten Dunst’s Mary the film’s tragic hero, and the lynchpin on which Joel and Clementine’s story eventually turns again. Dunst is all enthusiasm and giddiness in the film’s opening passages, truly in awe of Howard’s work and eager to get silly and fool around with Ruffalo. She is also really good at telegraphing the schoolgirl crush Mary has developed on her superior, and it’s devastating when she learns that she’s only repeating past mistakes and that the man she idolized wiped any memories of their time together from her mind. Dunst plays it so well, and Mary’s decision to share Lacuna’s private files with their clients is not portrayed as an act of vindictiveness but of moral resolve.
I don’t know that I appreciated this plot as much twenty years ago, when I was most drawn to the Joel/Clementine story. But the way the film deals with the moral minefields without feeling didactic or overly cerebral is brilliant. The ideas are all rooted and played out by engaging and likable characters; even though Clementine is unaware of what’s happening and Joel is unconscious, this entire subplot revolves around their story, allowing the philosophizing and ethical explorations to co-exist organically with the emotional, romantic story. And just as Clementine and Joel’s decisions to erase their memories have ripples that affect these characters, Mary’s decision to share Lacuna’s files eventually pushes the romantic leads back together.
It turns out that the scenes we saw at the beginning of the film all happened after Joel had the memory-wiping procedure, and he and Clementine both embedded a memory of their relationship deep enough that they find each other in the real world (one thing the film suggests but doesn’t underline is that Ruffalo’s character was so distracted by Dunst’s that he did a shoddy job on Joel, allowing him to hold on to Clementine a little longer). And after two dates, they return back to their homes – where they each have not only the Lacuna files, but audio tapes of them revealing horrible statements they’d made about each other. It’s a painful scene to listen to, as Joel hears Clementine describing him as boring and pathetic, and Clementine walks in on Joel listening to his own remarks about her perceived promiscuity and drunkenness. And yet, the two are so lonely and taken with each other that they agree to keep pursuing the relationship. It’s a happy, romantic ending.
Right?
A film in tension
Like I said, that’s how I initially read the ending – love triumphs despite heartache, conflict and awkwardness. And you can absolutely come to that reading of the film (it helps if you’re a single guy in his mid-twenties who wants to believe love conquers all).
There’s a theme running through the film that the beautiful moments of a relationship are worth the hardship. Joel is more than eager early on to erase Clementine forever. But as he gets deeper into his memories, he gets glimpses of moments he doesn’t want to lose; lovers staring at each other in bed; moments of silliness and frivolity; quiet connections. “Let me keep this one,” Joel thinks after witnessing one such memory. Gondry, with his DIY aesthetic and sense of optimism, gets a lot of power out of these moments of beauty and connection, and both Carrey and Winslet sell the final scene when, realizing that entering into a relationship will bring them conflict and heartache, decide that the pain is worth the plunder.
And even at 45, I believe that love is worth the fight. I’ve been married nearly 13 years. There have been moments of strife. My wife has seen me at my absolute worst and I’ve seen her in those same moments. Relationships are hard work, and I’m sure there are prior relationships that I’ve often wished I could erase. But as much hardship as there has been, my relationship with my wife has also been responsible for the most beautiful, life-giving and memorable moments in my life. We’ve seen each other at our ugliest, but we’ve also learned from our mistakes to make each other better. And so, even now, there’s a part of me that wants to believe that Joel and Clementine will build on this moment and hold onto love even when it gets ugly and tough. And I think Gondry, who came up with this film’s premise, believes so as well.
But this is also a movie springing from a Charlie Kaufman script. And if you haven’t been paying attention, Charlie Kaufman doesn’t do optimism. I love his works – Being John Malkovich and Adaptation are brilliant scripts, and I think both Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa are masterpieces. But a Kaufman film is often saturated with cynicism. His characters can’t escape their flaws and are prone to make bad decisions that will ensure they are left wallowing alone (I have not seen his Netflix kids’ movie Orion and the Dark yet; maybe that breaks the mold). And that strain also runs through Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The first time I truly picked up on this streak came on a subsequent viewing, over the film’s end credits. After Joel and Clementine reconcile in the hallway, the film cuts to them back at the beach, frolicking in the snow. The first time I saw the movie, I read this as a happy ending – they were together again. But on subsequent viewings, I picked up on how a series of edits throughout the shot suggest Joel and Clementine keep returning to the spot over and over again, as if caught in a loop. Did they get their happily ever after? Or are they damned to make the same mistakes again and again?
It’s quite possible that the differences that attract Joel and Clementine to each other also make them a toxic pair, and that by erasing each other, they’re fated to a vicious cycle of passion and heartbreak, never learning their lessons because they can never remember that they made a mistake. After all – how can you improve if you don’t know you screwed up? Kaufman doesn’t seem to believe that people can change; cynicism and despair are baked into his movies. Like Michael, who gets a temporary reprieve from his depression after a one-night stand in Anomalisa, will Joel and Clementine just find themselves lonely and in despair again? Will they be like Mary, who erased Mierzwiak from her mind only to fall for the same old charms again?
If Kaufman had directed this film, I believe the answer would lean toward the bleaker reading – his original script, after all, ended with the revelation that Joel and Clementine were still reuniting and erasing each other well into old age. And yet, I can’t deny the more romantic and optimistic strain that Gondry infuses into the film. Maybe Joel and Clementine keep returning to each other because they’re truly meant to be together. Perhaps Mary’s intervention will keep them from erasing each other and they’ll learn to grow. Are they fated to keep making each other miserable, or does love truly win out?
It would seem the conflicting worldviews could make the movie an unfocused jumble, but I actually find the tension between Gondry’s romanticism and Kaufman’s cynicism makes it more interesting than it came across 20 years ago. There are times I’ve viewed this movie as deeply hopeful and heartfelt; there have been times when I’ve watched Joel and Clementine run on that beach over the end credits and rolled my eyes at two people who think they can avoid making the same mistakes again. These days, I’ve learned to accept the film’s unresolved nature and admire it for not giving us an answer, growing in meaning and depth as I’ve turned it over in my mind.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind only reveals itself more and grows more fascinating with time. Twenty years later, it’s still one of the most original and inventive films I’ve seen.
