Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

What’s the Story?

Joel (Jim Carrey) is a shy man whose heart is broken when impulsive and free-spirited Clementine (Kate Winslet) leaves him. When he finds out that she's going to have all of her memories of him erased, he decides to do the same and consults Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkenson) of the Lacuna corporation, who talks him into the procedure. Joel brings everything that reminds him of Clementine and dictates all of his memories of her into a tape recorder. Then Stan (Mark Ruffalo), the Lacuna technician, begins the process of erasing Clementine's memory from Joel's brain. Mary (Kirsten Dunst), Lacuna's receptionist, mails out postcards to Joel's friends asking them never to mention Clementine again. But erasing someone from the mind is one thing; erasing someone from the heart is another. As Stan zaps the memories from Joel's brain, Joel realizes that he does not want to let Clementine go after all. There are memories he wants to keep. And then we are inside Joel's brain (or were we there all along?), as he and Clementine race to find a place to hide, where the memories will be kept safe. Or are those new memories? And is that Clementine who is advising him on how to hold on to her or is it his memory of her?

Is It Any Good?

This fabulously imaginative and deliciously loopy romance is the sweetest movie yet from the magnificently twisty mind of writer Charlie Kaufman, who plays with the themes of identity, time, memory, and attraction in a slightly off-kilter world that seems oddly homelike and familiar. Shot in a style that is both gritty and dreamy, the movie's insinuatingly casual tone gently nudges the concepts along so that it almost begins to make more sense than real life.

Carrey and Winslet risk making their characters as maddening to us as they are to each other and are ultimately as irresistible, too. Ruffalo, Wilkenson, and Dunst are impeccable, providing a bittersweet counterpoint of imperfection and longing. Director Michel Gondry matches Kaufman's script with understated but brilliantly original imagery of memory and forgetting.