"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind": “Unhappy memories! Yet be welcome, for you are my distant youth.”

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(Michel Gondry, 2004)

3 ½ stars

If relationships only exist in our minds, then what would happen if two people forgot that they ever knew each other? Logically, they’d pick up and move on with their lives; if they saw each other on the street or at the bus stop, they wouldn’t look up twice. But is love really that mental? Is it possible for a man who forgot everything he ever knew about his wife to (if he saw her again) still love her, even if he didn’t know why?

Tough question. What makes “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” so good is that it doesn’t really try answering it. (Yes, Joel and Clementine get back together at the end, but the movie never tells us why.) Hell, it doesn’t even openly ask it. Instead of long, eloquent monologues where the characters ponder deep questions of love and memory, it just gives us a simple (okay, complicated) story about what happens to Joel and Clementine when they go to a doctor to erase themselves from each other’s minds. The thinking? That’s our job.

Listen to that premise again: When people want to forget something in this movie – a disastrous first date or an embarrassing come-on, for example – all they have to do is make an appointment with a team of specialists and presto! Memories gone. (Lucky bastards. When I want to forget something, I have to spend months pushing it into the deepest, darkest, dustiest corners of my mind.)

Great premise, right? Charlie Kaufman, the same guy wrote “Being John Malkovich,” pushes it so far that you can almost see the seams. (And I mean that in the best way possible.) We see some weird stuff as the movie skips back and forth in time, charting Joel and Clementine’s relationship in the real world, in Joel’s memories and in those memories after the “doctor” starts, um, messing them up: Joel hiding Clementine in an unhappy memory where his mom walks in on him masturbating. A “previously erased memory” with faceless people straight out of “Jacob’s Ladder.” Disappearing houses and people. Memories that know they’re memories. (It sounds confusing, but as Roger Ebert points out, we never feel lost because we have an emotional core –Joel and Clementine – leading us along.)

And Michel Gondry finds the right way to film it. (Just watch the repressed childhood memories, or the scene where Clementine disappears in front of Joel’s eyes.) Normally I hate it when music video directors try making movies: their quirkiness and extreme attention to detail usually overshadows the story and makes the movie feel gimmicky. But when you’re making a movie that literally tours us down memory lane, you need these directors. Can you imagine what would have happened if Sydney Pollack had tried filming this story?

But as much as I want to avoid dying a painful death at the hands of Michel Gondry fans, he’s not the most original director working today. Aside from the standard music video director tricks that I’ve seen in everything from “Panic Room” to “Son of Rambow,” a lot of Gondry’s quirks (shaky camerawork, jump cuts, flip-flopping tone, impulsive/crazy women) come straight from French New Wave directors like Godard and Truffaut. In fact, if Truffaut were still alive, I probably would have assumed that he had made the movie. I’m not saying that Gondry is a thief (every director has influences) and I’m not saying that his style didn’t work for the movie (because it did), I just don’t want anyone thinking that he’s even half as original as guys like Terrence Malick or Werner Herzog.

For almost four years now, people have been telling me that I needed to watch this movie. I don’t know why it took me so long; memory is one of my favorite subjects. Maybe I assumed that Kaufman and Gondry took the Hollywood route and turned it into a plot device (don't ask me why), instead of actually trying to figure out how it works – and asking us tough questions about how much control we’d like to have over them. God knows I’ve done things that I’d rather forget, known “friends” who I’ve wanted to erase. But give them up? Never. Grating as they may be, those memories are part of me; erasing them would be like stabbing myself in the stomach. Remember the scene with the Alexander Pope quote? I would have used one from Georges Courteline:

“Unhappy memories! Yet be welcome, for you are my distant youth.”