Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind: 20th Anniversary- Still An Unforgettable Masterpiece
Quick Take: We live in a wonderful time where studios like A24 and Neon are boosting interesting filmmakers, and challenging wide audiences to like films not initially thought to be mainstream. That’s how we get something like Everything Everywhere All At once. But, how is it that in this great age, with the rise of filmmakers like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, that Michel Gondry is nowhere to be found? I realized, after enjoying Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind for the umpteenth time, that Gondry was a bold voice behind the camera, and I feel like I should have ten more films like this to enjoy. He was offered the ill-fated The Green Hornet, and seemingly got punished for that failure. A lesson we didn’t learn from The Shadow, is that these properties are hard to adapt.
However, this is Eternal Sunshine, the bizarro romantic comedy about a man who finds out the woman he just dated paid a company to erase her memory completely of him. Being in a dark place himself, he decides to follow the same path, only to meet it with a lot of regret, as he scrambles to hold onto the beautiful memories he forgot he had, as they were clouded by the most recent unpleasant ones. It is a musing on relationships, and the totality of our experiences with another. In the short term, we often find ways to deal with the pain, that are an overreaction, leading to a total loss of the full experience. This is something that stars Jim Carrey (who was criminally robbed of an Oscar nomination) and Kate Winslet explore so well in this comedic look at a path taken that cannot be undone… or can it? is there any hope at the end of this tunnel?
I own a digital copy of this from the Apple Store, because the movie I saw 20 years ago was too visually striking for me to spend the next however many years of my life just watching my DVD without audio description. This is one of my favorite movies, and one of the best of 2004, and really, ever. It might be hard to cram it into a top 100 films of all time, but considering the thousands of domestic films, and thousands of international films, putting Eternal Sunshine comfortably in a top 1,000, or even 500, is a task. I do believe this movie is safely in the first, and arguably as safe in the latter. For more, check out my video.
