Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

I have been extremely behind on my reviews, and that is partially due to my laziness, but also due to the fact that there were two films on my agenda that I had to let serenade in my brain before fixating my opinions on them. The first film was Another Earth, a movie that I just posted a review for. The second film was Charlie Kaufman’s Oscar-winning film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry and starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, among others including David Cross. Just from the fact that I bothered to mention the entire cast makes you know that I am a fan of this film. This is a very difficult film to review, on one hand because I just finished Jason Reitman’s fabulous drama Up in the Air, which actually brought me to tears during the credits (read my soon-to-be-published review for the full scoop on that), and also because the emotion you get in this film is a word that nobody has invented yet. It has no definition, it cannot be explained in words why this film is so perfect. Because it isn’t. On paper, this is an extremely good film, heck, even a great film, so why does it work so dang well? Because of the imaginary word I am inventing to describe the feeling of this film-Kaufmanium. Kaufmanium is a rare creative element that is sometimes described as just pure joy. Without a doubt, Kaufmanium is something very many films aspire to, but very few achieve. Kaufmanium is the basic notion that something will look better than it does on paper just because it has Kaufmanium in it. There is no real way to describe Kaufmanium, only that this film has a lot of it. Either way, this film stars Jim Carrey in a dramatic role as Joel, a man who finds out that his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) had her memories of him erased, and so he goes to have the exact same process done to him, with the help of an organization known as Lacuna, Inc, run by the eccentric Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), his secretary Mary (Kirsten Dunst), and his two field operatives who actually go to your house and hook you up to this MRI-looking machine that wiped your memories, Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood), one of whom (spoiler: It’s Frodo!) is actually using the memories of Clementine to date her, and we see the memories of Joel’s as they are being erased, but they are conscious of it all, it’s all extremely confusing, and I do really hope that I will get to watch it again on Blu-ray quite soon. But either way, as confusing as my plot synopsis sounds, it’s nowhere near as insane as it actually is. But this is a wonderful film, one every single human being on the planet should check out, and dang it, it’s filled to the brim with Kaufmanium. And that should mean enough, in imaginary weird land.
9/10