Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at 20: a love story that’s impossible to forget

The greatest screen romances are usually about failure, not happily ever afters. Love sacrificed. Love unrequited. Love forbidden by social mores or bad timing or the tectonic forces of history. Think Casablanca. Brief Encounter. In the Mood for Love. The Age of Innocence. Moonlight. Considered another way, though, they’re powerful because they end so pristinely, before the banal hassles and petty fissures of everyday life make a mess of things. Give a relationship enough time and Before Sunrise turns into Before Midnight.

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One of the reasons why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, now 20 years old, ranks among the best love stories of the 21st century is that it makes the unique argument that failure is an essential, precious part of romantic experience. It’s only human to want that pain to go away, but the film suggests that literally making it so would be a wish on a monkey’s paw, offering some short-term relief, perhaps, but with unanticipated long-term consequences. People usually have many more failed relationships before one that succeeds, after all, and the accumulation of experience and memory not only means something, but that meaning isn’t static. Bitter moments can turn bittersweet.

By 2004, when Eternal Sunshine was released, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman had already established himself as a great poet of failure with his scripts for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, two comedies about dysfunctional, sweat-caked men who struggle to transcend their limitations. Kaufman was also the rarest of rare talents: a screenwriter whose voice was so unmistakably original that critics credited him over his directors. That may give short shrift to the contributions of Spike Jonze, who directed Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and Michel Gondry, who had made the less-heralded Human Nature, but Jonze and Gondry seemed inclined to yield to Kaufman’s grungy conceptual wizardry.

Though Kaufman would eventually go behind the camera himself with audacious future films like Synecdoche, New York and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Eternal Sunshine is one film where the writer and the director, Gondry again, make equally formidable and complementary contributions. In order to make a complicated point about love and memory, Kaufman’s script takes occasional residence inside one man’s conscience, not unlike he did with Being John Malkovich. But here, Gondry’s experience as an innovator on music video – particularly the in-camera effects in work like Bjork’s Bachelorette or Kylie Minogue’s Come into My World – gives his frantic odyssey a lo-fi visual pop.

Eternal Sunshine begins at the end, creating a structural loop that Kaufman pointedly opts not to close completely. On his way to work on a cold February morning, Joel Barish, played by dramatically toned down Jim Carrey, impulsively decides to take a commuter train to Montauk and winds up hitting it off with a vivacious stranger, Clementine (Kate Winslet), he meets on the platform. What neither of them realize is that not only have they met before, but they had a long-term relationship that ended in a painful breakup. They just don’t remember anything about it, at least nothing beyond a few tremors of deja vu.

There’s a not-very-simple explanation for all this. After the breakup, Clementine enlisted the services of a company called Lucuna, which offers clients a procedure to target and erase memories from the brain. When Joel discovers through mutual friends that Clementine had him erased, he does likewise, which triggers a hilariously analog session where technicians (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood) strap a colander-like device to his head and use an old computer to zap the affected areas while he’s unconscious. (When Joel asks Lucuna’s chief doctor, played by Tom Wilkinson, whether the procedure risks brain damage, he replies: “Well, technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage.”)

As the session goes on and he experiences the lost memories as a kind of agitated waking dream, Joel starts to rebel and whisks Clementine away to recesses of his mind where he thinks the technicians won’t find him. This gives Gondry license to create vivid scenes that darken and contort as his memories are scrubbed, like Polaroids developing in reverse. It also allows Carrey to retreat to his childlike comic persona at times while showing a more vulnerable side as an actor, as Joel finds himself clinging to Clementine despite whatever residual animosity he feels over their breakup. He doesn’t like the idea that he won’t remember her.

Eternal Sunshine doesn’t limit the comic friction to Joel and Clementine, either. There’s also a love triangle at Lucuna involving the young secretary (Kirsten Dunst) that creates its own kind of mess, a salty back-and-forth between two of Joel’s friends (David Cross and Jane Adams), and a creepy subplot where a Lucuna technician uses Joel’s file to hook up with Clementine. There’s not a single relationship in the film that seems settled and happy, which could be said of every relationship in a Charlie Kaufman project. And yet, Eternal Sunshine remains a deeply romantic film, because those fleeting moments of connection are magical and Kaufman has a secret appreciation for the mating habits of our flawed species.

There are many grace notes that make the film as indelible as the memories that Joel longs to keep: the delicate score by Jon Brion, who also collaborates with Beck on a gorgeous cover of the Korgis’ Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime, the off-season majesty of a frozen lake and a Long Island beach in winter, and Kaufman’s typically pungent dialogue, which zaps away sentiment like a Lucuna desktop. Eternal Sunshine celebrates the essential untidiness of love, the beautiful messes two people can make together. It’s a folly to think we’d want it any other way.