Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Directed by Michel Gondry
Joel Barish, heartbroken that his girlfriend underwent a procedure to erase him from her memory, decides to do the same. However, as he watches his memories of her fade away, he realises that he still loves her, and may be too late to correct his mistake.
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40 films that influenced this film
What critics say influenced Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Filmmakers who have ignored Hitch's advice with varying results include the Paul Verhoeven ("Total Recall"), Christopher Nolan ("Memento"), the Wachowski Brothers ("The Matrix"), Terry Gilliam ("Brazil"), Ingmar Bergman ("Wild Strawberries"), David Lynch ("Lost Highway") and Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris"), Cameron Crowe via Alejandro Amenábar ("Vanilla Sky"/"Open Your Eyes") and that's just off the top of my head.
I never thought that I’d be comparing All the Real Girls with Memento in the same review.
Writer Charlie Kaufman spins another tale of the search for love among the maladjusted, this one a head-spinning combination of "Groundhog Day" and "Memento", featuring Jim Carrey's best performance to date.
This is the heart of the story and the fact that it is the thing that stands out in a film that, on the surface, plays like a romantic-comedy riff on "Memento" and "Total Recall" makes it all the more startling.
But in some ways, it's his most ambitious work to date, combining the puzzle-box structure of a "Memento" with the mind games of "Malkovich," and letting a troupe of fine actors run free with it.
Borrowing sequencing techniques from Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Eternal Sunshine delights and befuddles in much the same fashion, forcing viewers to experience the characters’ lingering sense of dislocation from the very circumstances of their own lives.
The inspiration for ''Sunshine,'' seems to be Harold Ramis's ''Groundhog Day,'' which -- like any great movie -- gains in stature as time passes.
Writer Charlie Kaufman spins another tale of the search for love among the maladjusted, this one a head-spinning combination of "Groundhog Day" and "Memento", featuring Jim Carrey's best performance to date.
The movie has the virtue of consistency and coherence—allied, within the movie's ambivalent but increasingly traditional ideology, with the virtues of smalltown American life—but, compared to other smugglings of high-wire absurdism into a pop format like Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , Groundhog Day palpably lacks any kind of directorial verve.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell has called the classic screwball movies like The Awful Truth (1937) and The Lady Eve (1941) "comedies of remarriage," in which couples are rudely bounced from their Edenic connubial gardens and reunited (after a series of farcical/magical contrivances) in a spirit of wry realism: This time they know they'll live bumpily ever after.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell has called the classic screwball movies like The Awful Truth (1937) and The Lady Eve (1941) "comedies of remarriage," in which couples are rudely bounced from their Edenic connubial gardens and reunited (after a series of farcical/magical contrivances) in a spirit of wry realism: This time they know they'll live bumpily ever after.
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James Joyce might have applauded this Phil Dick-caustic/Gnostic rendition of his Nighttown from Ulysses , with Clementine as Joel’s face-changing Penelope/Molly Bloom.
During the procedure itself, Kaufman probes every dimension of Joel and Clementine's relationship, bouncing around temporally like an LSD-enhanced version of Two for the Road (the great 1967 relationship study with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney).
Groundhog Day and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind flow from it, Cronenberg envisions the giant headspace in a garage in Scanners, Steve Martin in The Lonely Guy renders tribute to the greeting-card gag.
Suffice it to say, Tarkovsky aside, Gondry and Kaufman were also clearly influenced by the time-bending anti-linearity honed by the likes of Chris Marker (in La Jetée) and Alain Resnais (in Je t’aime, je t’aime, La Guerre est Finie, and other films).
Oddly enough, the film has a lot in common with Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, in that it presents a similar portrait of a relationship via cinematic trickery and also reaches a similar conclusion: that the joy of love is worth the pain of breaking up.
Kaufman's morbidity concerning the basic hopeless of romantic relationships provides the emotional spine of one of the most insightfully sad explorations of the human drive for love since Annie Hall concluded that we need the eggs.
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As directed by music-video wizard Michel Gondry, whose gift for plasticity gets more of a workout than it did in his underrated but less-inspired Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine has the go-for-broke excitement of an early Nicolas Roeg movie like The Man Who Fell To Earth.
I thought the film's underlying sadness reminded me a bit of "Punch-Drunk Love," and then I notice that film and this one had the same composer, Jon Brion.
When Adam Sandler starred in “Punch-Drunk Love” a couple of years ago, many of his fans hated the film.
Jon Brion's ("Punch-Drunk Love") original music should cement his reputation as the quintessential composer for off beat films of unique vision.