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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Widescreen Edition) Customer Reviews (25 - 27 of 42 Reviews)

How far would you go to forget someone?
Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet star in this very original and hard to label drama that you will either love or hate. Carrey plays Joel, a depressed loner who meets free-spirit Clementine (Winslet). Their relationship runs its course, then each decides to use modern technology to erase the other from their memory. Most of the film takes place in Joel's mind as sights and sounds from their past flash before his unconscious and he finds he doesn't really want to forget her.

This movie is more art-house than mainstream, and is made up of an endless montage of psychedelic sights and sounds that you will either find fascinating or tedious. It is a trip into the subconscious where things rarely make sense. Images of childhood are chaotically blended with recent memories, leaving Joel (and the audience) to sort it all out.

Jim Carrey gives a touching and mature performance mixing sadness, desire, and fear. If you like strikingly visual and surreal interpretations of the mind, you will enjoy this film.

This is the stuff I go to movies for
Everyone knows the plot and I don't want to spoil too much here. All I will say is that Eternal Sunshine is a brilliant movie about love, life, regret, and happiness. It will make you feel like a child inside. Charlie Kaufman knows how to write incredible scripts about human nature (why, that's even the title of one of them). Michel Gondry accents Kaufman a lot more than Jonze did, Gondry is a master at directing (see his music videos for more proof). I'd say he even has as many ideas as Kaufman.
Jim Carrey can't act very well, but he does his most convincing "serious" drama acting here. Kate Winslet is pretty great, she plays a "free spirit" I guess but the beauty is that nothing in this film is derivative or two dimensional. I think to make a truly romantic movie the two leads have to have chemistry. And they do, and Kate Winselt is pretty good in her role. David Cross has an amusing cameo and Tom Wilkinson is perfect as the guy who runs Lacuna Inc.
Lacuna Inc is great, perfectly designed as a cheap plastic surgery-type place. Kirsten Dunst is annoying in just about everything, but I sort of liked her here. Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood and her sidestory is just as creative and involving as the main storyline.
Jon Brion's score is great, not your average score by any means. Lots of weird noises and instruments. Accentuates the film greatly.
It's hard to write an ecstatic and joyful five-star review without sounding like a geek or using malapropisms. It's a tightrope but Eternal Sunshine deserves every adjective I've described.
We have a romantic comedy that is both incredibly romantic and amusing at times. It's a movie about people, people overcoming their mistakes and learning to live. We don't have cardboard cutouts or lame comic reliefs. This is a film that is amazing to watch, because it demands our attention and Gondry directs it (and a certain amount of the work belongs to the cinematographer) so that it rewards you visually as well.
It's just refreshing to see a movie so alive, so eager to tell a story, that's about something. Once Joel tries to stop the procedure, the film gains a momentum that never stops until the ending.
I'm not going to bother nitpicking with its few problems. I'll review this again once the DVD hits. This is the best film of 2004.

Unforgettable
"Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" were clever--but "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is simply beautiful. There are elements of comedy and science fiction, yes, but at heart, it's simply a perfectly captured, bittersweet love story--one that, if you're single, makes you long for such a relationship, even as you watch it disintegrate.

It should be pointed out that the movie--a close second to "Lost in Translation" among the best films in recent memory--is by no means just a Charlie Kaufman vehicle. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play against type perfectly, truly inhabiting the characters of Joel and Clementine. Michel Gondry deftly brings his and Kaufman's story to the screen, putting his music-video background to good use while taking care not to overwhelm things with too much fancy footwork. And Jon Brion's score brilliantly accentuates the scenes without threatening to overshadow them.

There are some simply lovely shots in this movie, among them Joel and Clem on the frozen Charles River; a little girl in a cowgirl outfit leading young Joel away from a group of taunting boys; and Joel and Clem on the snow-covered beach at Montauk. One memorable shot that the filmmakers simply stumbled upon was the elephant parade over which Kirsten Dunst reads the lines of Alexander Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard" which give the movie its title. But my words really don't do these scenes justice. See the film for yourself. It is more than worth the price of admission, and that is an all-too-rare thing these days.

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