Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

By the time Oscar nominations roll along, the academy seems to forget about the films released in February and March. That's a shame, because Eternal Sunshine is a terrific movie, and would make a credible and creditable Oscar candidate.

What would you do if the woman you love went to a mind-erasure service and had them remove all traces of you?

Well, I know the answer in real life, but this is the movies.

In real life, you would be sitting in the catbird's seat. Assume your relationship has been having problems. That's why she had her mind erased in the first place, right? Having erased the memory of all those sour moments, she is now free to fall in love with you again, not knowing about the bad times, not remembering the mistakes you made, not aware of some of the ugly things you said in the heat of an argument. You, on the other hand, are aware of the erasure, know what went wrong, and if you are a thoughtful person, can avoid the worst problems. You've been given a second chance. 

This movie isn't about that.

That's way too logical and predictable to come from the disordered mind of Charlie Kaufman.

He is an eccentric man, possibly completely mad, as were many of the greatest writers in history. Melville was nutty as a fruitcake. Dostoevsky and Gogol, likewise. Blake? Don't even go there. The advantage of madness is that it pushes a mind to wander where other minds would not go, to invent outside the boundaries of reality. This is not an especially desirable characteristic for a doctor or a judge, but it can be the wellspring of originality for painters and writers. This is precisely what created the old cliché about the thin line between genius and insanity - both geniuses and madmen see what others cannot. Both ignore objective reality and the boundaries of convention. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is one or the other ... or both ... it doesn't really matter.

Kaufman doesn't take the logical, predictable path I followed above, and the very fact that he has no grasp of reality is precisely what makes him so uniquely effective. Reality would have screwed up this story.

When the man in this film finds out that his woman has erased him, instead of viewing it as a fresh opportunity to relive the good times and avoid the mistakes, he thinks that the only way to purge his malaise is to have her erased from his mind as well. The procedure itself takes a few hours, and this film is about what goes on in the man's unconscious mind as his memories are being erased. Somehow, he becomes aware of the erasure process from deep in his drug-induced coma, and he tries to hide some of the good memories from the scientists and technicians who are mapping his brain. He even tries to wake up, as if in a bad dream, and tell them to stop. The technicians have their own issues as well, and get distracted from the process, so the man becomes free - at least temporarily - to poke around in the memories of his romance, and its relationship to other events that made him into the man who entered that romance in the first place.

Along the way, he comes to understand who he is, and why things didn't work out. In the process of doing so, he comes to an understanding that the early promise of a new love is inevitably doomed to face crisis and pain, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on how the partners handle it.

That's an extremely oversimplified summary. The script is filled with nuances, quirks, and interwoven sub-plots, and is sculpted in such a clever way that the film even includes some of the best elements of the mystery and thriller genres.

I confess that I usually get bored by films that have a character wandering in and out of dreams and memories, but I never lost interest in this film for a second. The main deal drove forward at exactly the right pace, with just the right cards hidden. The sub-plots, although sometimes seeming to be irrelevant at the time they were introduced, all served a purpose in the master design.

In a sense, it is a work of great literature that just happens to be in a convenient "genre film" format, ala Blade Runner. It is also remarkably entertaining.

See it.