Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
November 2004 Reviewed by: Eric Hetherington Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Michael Gondry's latest film asks two important philosophical questions. First, do we have an obligation to the truth? If, for example, I have a painful memory but could choose to lose that memory, would it be morally acceptable for me to do so? Second, what constitutes a person's identity? If I were to erase all of my memories, would the resulting person be me? How much of our personal identity is, in fact, the store of memories we have? These philosophical questions have been addressed by some of the best 20th-century philosophers, but none have done so in a way as entertaining to non-philosophers as Gondry's movie does.

The movie begins with what seems like a traditional love story. Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) meets Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) on Montauk Beach and they fall in love. We will come to realize that these two people have known each other before -- although neither remembers. One day when Joel attempted to visit Clementine, she acted as if she had no idea who he is. He discovers the reason: Lacuna, a company run by Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his assistants Stan (Mark Ruffalo), Patrick (Elijah Wood), and Mary (Kirsten Dunst), is able to erase memories from a person’s brain so he or she need no longer remember lovers lost. Joel signs up for their procedure too, which involves their connecting machinery to him while he is asleep. During the procedure, when Joel discovers that he really does not want to lose his memories of her, he tries to hide Clementine in his other memories. Through the relationship between Joel and Clementine, and the one between Mierzwiak and Mary, we see that the science of erasing memory has multiple results.

The performances throughout the movie are very good. I do not enjoy Jim Carrey in his sillier roles, but here he gives a down-to-earth performance as the out-of-luck Joel that is much more Truman Show than Ace Ventura. Winslet is a very believable Clementine, and Ruffalo, Wood and Dunst do a good job at capturing the slack outlook of their characters. The sound on the DVD is well done -- the dialogue is clear and the soundtrack well mixed in the surround format. Visually, the disc captures bright colors well, and dark scenes are produced so that you can still make out moving figures against a dark background.

The real cinematic treat here is Gondry's direction and Kaufman's screenplay. Gondry and the film's cinematographer, Ellen Kuras, as well as editor Valdís Óskarsdóttir, are to be applauded for using uniquely cinematic techniques to tell this story. Jump cuts and off-center angle shots help to highlight the strangeness of situations and to provoke an immediate reaction in the viewer, whether of emotion or of confusion. This is not new for either Kaufman or Gondry. Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Gondry used some of the techniques earlier in his career as a music video director, which can be seen on the DVD The Work of Director Michael Gondry.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will not answer hard philosophical questions for you, but it will get you to think about them. Philosophical enlightenment will only occur through doing some hard thinking yourself and working through the questions raised in Eternal Sunshine.

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