43rd Favorite Movie - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

On our trip last week, I noticed one of the signs in a subway station said "To Montauk" and I immediately thought of a key line from this film: "meet me in "Montauk". I had never realized that the film takes place in New York and that Montauk was an actual place. Now I want to see it again and see if I can pick up on any other NY references. The day we got home from the trip, I skimmed through The Catcher in the Rye (one of my all-time favorite books) to see how many Manhattan locations are in it that we saw. There were a lot: Radio City Music Hall, the carousel and pond at Central Park, Rockefeller Center, the Museum of Natural History, Broadway, the interior of a NY cab... ok now I'm stretching. But for some reason it is more fun to see these places after you have read about them in a book or seen them in a movie. Why that is, I don't know. Maybe it just provides some context and meaning to the place. Maybe it makes for a more solid memory in your head since you have seen it in person.

The next movie on my list, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is about the power of memory. The film stars Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, and Tom Wilkinson. Pretty solid cast, huh. But it is first and foremost a Charlie Kaufman movie. Charlie Kaufman is the guy who wrote Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind along with Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. He has a style all to his own. In a Charlie Kaufman script, reality is thrown out the window and you often find yourself "in the head" of one of the characters. This is never more true than in Being John Malkovich, which is about a portal that literally takes you into the head of the actor John Malkovich. At one point in the film (the scene I liked the most) Kaufman shows us the memories of a caged ape who reflects on being free in the jungle before he was captured. In short, I don't like Kaufman and I absolutely hated Adaptation. I think his style is pretentious and show-offy and too "Kaufman-esque". But with this story, which requires a break from reality and for us to really get into the minds of its principal characters, it works perfectly.

The film is basically a love story. Anyone who has ever been through a bad break-up can probably relate to this film. After breaking up with Joel (Jim Carrey), Clementine (Kate Winslet) decides to take advantage of the newest technology and have all memories of him erased from her brain. Who hasn't wanted a totally fresh start after a painful breakup? Joel hears about this and decides to do the same thing. Although halfway through the procedure, he decides the memories he has of Clementine are so precious they are worth the pain associated with them.

I'm not going to say any more and spoil what happens for those of you who haven't seen it, but the film makes you wonder, "if I were to have met the person I love now at a different time in both of our lives, would we still be together?" It also poses the old question, "is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?" Can 'eternal sunshine of the mind' only be achieved by ridding the memory of its painful 'spots'?

This is a movie for people who love cinema and like to analyze films, which is evident from its #38 ranking on the Top 250 at imdb.com. I think it is cool that Kaufman chose to name Kate Winslet's character Clementine. After hearing that she has decided to erase him for her memory, you can almost imagine Joel being tormeted by that song that goes, "you were lost and gone forever, oh my darling Clementine..."