Well, Jim Carrey as Joel, is one of the fantastic components of this film. And his trauma is just bizarre!
With ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, writer Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry have created a film which has a purpose to blur and fade, a self-erasing tribute to the fragility of memory and of love.
The film, launched on video this week, starts truly enough on one cold, grey Valentine's morning, when moody introvert Joel Barrish (Jim Carrey) decides on impulse to ignore work and take a train out to Montauk, Long Island. There, on a desolate beach, he encounters manic extrovert Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet). The two start speaking on the train journey home to New York, and over the subsequent two nights love begins to bloom.
Eager to "get on with her life," Clementine had all memory of Joel erased from her mind via a low-rent clinical outfit known as Lacuna. Discovering Clementine's betrayal, Joel is determined to have the process carried out on himself as well. That night, unconscious in his bed as Lacuna technicians work around him, Joel relives every memory of Clementine even as it is wiped from his brain.
The erasing method works backward in time, starting with the most current memories, full of fights and ill-will. But as the technique reaches further back, to moments of tenderness and joy, Joel rediscovers his love for Clementine and realises he no longer desires to lose these recollections after all. He tries frantically to discover an obscure corner of his idea, the place he can cover some scrap of her from the technicians' hunt and damage mission, however they continually find him.
He watches helplessly as, one by one, every memory is irretrievably lost, titles fade from the covers of books, passersby disappear, and then Clementine too vanishes, only to reappear in any other doomed recollection, all the way returned to their very first meeting, at a seaside birthday celebration in Montauk.
