Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Another of the more recent movies that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar that I'm having to watch before they expire off my cloud DVR is one that's only 20 years old: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Jim Carrey plays Joel Barish, who lives in one of those Long Island suburbs that's been turning more downmarket ove the past few decades, working some sort of office job that requires him to commute on the LIRR. One day, when he gets to the train station, he decides impulsively to get on a train going in the other direction, out to Montauk, even though it's the middle of winter. On the beach in Montauk, Joel sees a blue-haird young woman, but writes in his journal instead. The two wind up on the same train back, however, and the woman is outgoing enough to make the first move approaching Joel.

The woman is Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), and she seems to be one of those people who can be fun, but also way too outgoing and a bit too high-energy as a result. Still, the two start a relationship, albeit with strong hints that the relationship isn't going to work out and the two are going to break up eventually. Indeed, one day when Joel shows up at Clementine's place there's another man there, Patrick (Elijah Wood) wondering why Joel is there. A few days later, Joel goes to the bookstore where Clementine works retail, and she acts like she doesn't know Joel at all. And another guy shows up who is clearly Clementine's new boyfriend.

Joel talks to some of his friends about all of this, and they have a shock for him. They give him a business card from a company called Lacuna (Latin for "hole" and usually used in English with the sense of "gap"). They're a company that does the sort of thing that would be considered controversial. People come to them with uncomfortable memories, and ask the "good" doctors at Lacuna to erase those memories from their minds. When Joel finds out about this, he's pissed.

With that in mind, Joel goes to Lacuna and demands from Dr. Mierzwiak that Lacuna perform the same procedure on him so that he too can forget Clementine. The procedure involves bringing in a bunch of stuff associated with the memories in question, followed by the patient taking a pill to knock them out at which point the Lacuna employees come in to remove the memories. The patient will wake up feeling a bit hung over but with all the memories gone.

This time, however, Lacuna sends a couple of less-experienced employess. One is the aforementioned Patrick; the other is Stan (Mark Ruffalo). Complicating matters is that Stan's girlfriend Mary (Kirsten Dunst), another employee at Lacuna, shows up, and Mary and Stan act extremely unprofessionally. So much that the procedure begins to go wrong when one of the wires gets disconnected.

This disconnection causes Joel's memory to go haywire and his subconscious to decide that perhaps he didn't want to undergo the procedure at all. (Joel, being unconscious, can't reveal that he might like to withdraw consent.) So Joel starts trying to compartmentalize his memories with Clementine in places that wouldn't otherwise be identified with Clementine so that Lacuna can't find them.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an intriguing movie that Wikipedia refers to as a "cult classic". I can understand why. For the most part I liked the movie, except that I found myself having some big ethical problems with the whole premise of wanting one's memory erased. Never mind the plot hole that there's way too much outside the patient's purview to erase all the memories. Star Trek: The Next Generation did an interesting episode on the same premise of an alien race erasing the crew's memory of the race, only for them to discover signs that there are all sorts of unexplained gaps.

Still, the story is told very well and the acting is quite good, with Carrey showing he can do drama as well as zany comedy. If you haven't seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before, it's definitely worth watching.