"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd"

Alexander Pope

In all probability, Jim Carrey will never win an Oscar. But at some point, the Academy will likely offer him a career achievement trophy.

Often such things are a make-good for past injustices. And if the doddering old voters scrape the remnants of their consciences - the ones who actually go out and see movies that is – it will be a make-good for the spectacular neglect of Carrey’s performance in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Not that Eternal Sunshine – which was released 10 years ago this month – was completely ignored. Hollywood at the time was utterly besotted with the mind-bending non-linear writing abilities of Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) and rewarded him with a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

And rightly so. The story, about Joel and Clementine (Carrey and Kate Winslet), who meet on a train with no memory of having previously been involved in a two-year relationship, speaks to love, trauma and the intrinsic value of even our most painful memories in shaping who we are.

The sci-fi aspect of the movie is embodied in Lacuna Inc., a company that specializes in wiping out traumatic memories. We discover that Clementine opted to have Joel wiped out of her mind as their relationship painfully disintegrated, and that a distraught Joel followed suit. Much of the movie is a depiction of Joel’s memories being experienced as they’re being erased – though the process becomes more problematic as Joel’s brain resists. An added complication: Patrick (Elijah Wood) has begun a relationship of his own with the brain-wiped Clementine.

(The terrific supporting cast is also sometimes forgotten – including Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst as “real-world” technicians with fleshed-out lives and deceptions of their own).



A scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Memory-wiping is hardly an original thought (it’s central to Total Recall, for example). But Eternal Sunshine is, at heart, about the power of emotions. And its technological gimmick is itself a metaphor. In fact, our own brains have that very defence mechanism, of burying or hiding memories of tragedy or loss, at least from our day-to-day lives. And like the technology in Eternal Sunshine, it too can backfire on us.

Both Carrey and Winslet deserved props for carrying these themes – Clementine impulsively, Joel bravely. And there’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that Carrey was denied because he’d made comedies where he talked out of his butt.

And then, of course, there’s Gondry’s cinematic palette, a blend of reality and dream-state that would show up later in more sledgehammer form in stuff like Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Gondry’s gentle touch gives us snow on a beach, the cracking of ice, repeated motifs of sand, and people’s faces disappearing – metaphor piled upon metaphor into a visual poem.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind transcended entertainment, while being utterly entertaining. Its crowning irony was that a movie about erasing thoughts was one of the most thoughtful movies of this century.

Twitter: @jimslotek

Jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca