Movie Review, Sort Of

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I wasn’t planning to write in the journal tonight, and, as I sit here, the NCAA basketball finals are taking place, but I just saw a remarkable movie and I want to write about it while it’s still fresh in my mind.
We went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this afternoon and were blown away. For some reason this movie really struck a chord in me. And it’s a love story. Yikes.
The screen play was written by Charlie Kaufman, whose other films include Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. Adaptation was probably the best movie I had seen in a few years, and I was expecting to be disappointed by this one, but I wasn’t. This film is typical of Kaufman, with plenty of confusing twists, and imagery that makes you cock your head several times during the first half hour. But things start to come together subtly, until you are immersed in the story and tied to the characters, almost as if you knew them.
The premise is that an agency has the ability to erase unpleasant memories from your mind. The main character, Joel, played by Jim Carry, finds that his girlfriend unexpectedly doesn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore. He is devastated, and is led to the agency, where he decides to have the procedure to erase the memory of her. Kate Winslet plays his soon to be erased girlfriend Clementine, and is very good as an impulsive, free spirit type coming to grips with an ultimate need for love. This is a far cry from her character in the melodramatic love story Titanic, and thank God I can take her seriously now.
Carry is good too, finally reigning in his exaggerated, jerky demeanor without seeming out of his element, or straight jacketed in any way. He plays a shy, awkward, nice guy very believably, and pulls off the few moments of comedy without any of the scene stealing he is sometimes known for.
But this is sounding like a pretentious review. The acting, mixed with a brain twisting plot and innovative directing made for a great film experience. Sometimes when my girlfriend and I see a movie, we disagree on whether we liked it or not. I was expecting the same this time, but when we got to the car she said “Wow, that movie was really good.” That’s pretty high praise from her.
The last current release we saw was Lost in Translation with Bill Murray and we were bored out of our minds. We just couldn’t find anything interesting in it. It was Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter’s movie, and we suspected that the good reviews came from Coppola’s henchmen leaning on the reviewers. We were just kidding about that of course.