Hub_92 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi

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by alasdair stuart

3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders”

Joel ditches work one morning and, on impulse, goes out to Montauk. He meets Clementine on the train home, a wildly articulate,spiky, blue haired tornado who sweeps him off his feet.

Joel sits in his car, sobbing as ‘Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime’ plays on the stereo.

On a sunny morning, encased in a duvet, Clementine tells Joel she always thought she was ugly.

Joel wakes up, as outside, a car pulls away.

Joel and Clementine play in the snow on a Montauk beach, laughing as they throw snow over each other. Nothing is mundane when you’re in love. Every moment has a brilliant, shining opalescence to it that renders the normal magical, your partner extraordinary and the world a better place. You see in their eyes not only the idealised version of yourself but also the unshakeable belief that that is the person you will one day be. There is no feeling on Earth like it, nothing as empowering, as intoxicating, as wonderful. But when you drop all your barriers you drop your defences and in those unguarded moments of honesty when you say not just what you think but what will hurt the most, you see nothing but disappointment in your partner’s eyes, as, once again, you fail to live up to their expectations.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind exists in the hinterland between these two statements and in turn between two genres. It’s definitively science fiction but it’s also a romantic comedy/drama, each strand inter laced and wrapped around one another like Joel’s increasingly deteriorating, knotted memories. It’s both incredibly complicated and incredibly simple, the most grounded fantasy movie of the last ten years. It’s also Jim Carrey’s career best work.

Carrey’s serious work is consistently his most interesting and here he’s at the top of his game, playing a man whose rich internal life and dialogue is only made external as it’s collapsing. Joel is an intensely normal man, clearly shy, clearly broken in the way almost everyone is and at the same time consumed by the dissatisfaction that kicks in at the end of the ‘20s. He’s articulate and smart, funny and kind, shy and invisible. To most of the world, Joel is as faceless, as indistinct as the inhabitants of his memories.

Clementine brings him into focus, forces him to the front of his life and like Carrey, Winslet has never been better than she is here. Aggressive, confrontational and barely holding it together, Clementine is Joel’s polar opposite. The only common ground they have is in the silent, unspoken acknowledgement that the world has broken them both and perhaps, with an extra pair of hands, they can at least patch the damage. The chemistry is instant and from the moment Winslet pursues Carrey across a railway platform with cheerful aggression to the final, tear-stained but hopeful exchange, that chemistry is maintained. These people belong together, regardless of whether or not they can survive that way.

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