![]() Was there more to Kaufman than I'd previously given him credit for? In fact, the first 20 minutes or so of "Eternal Sunshine" are so free of gimmickry and self-consciousness that I almost couldn't believe it had been written by Kaufman, who has built a tidy career out of writing cool-weird puzzle movies, brain teasers for modern audiences who might get bored if they were left to do the work of simply confronting their emotions. The best moments of "Eternal Sunshine" are deeply and desperately moving: At times the picture feels achingly alive. "Eternal Sunshine" is a meditation on the way other people go to work on us in ways we're barely aware of, like ghostwriters who grab the pen when we're not looking, writing new chapters for us that are better than any we could have come up with on our own. Joel realizes that in allowing bits of Clementine to disappear, he's also erasing chunks of himself. The movie traces the romance in reverse-order flashbacks, starting with the most painful memories of the breakup and working forward to the earliest, sweetest ones. In "Eternal Sunshine," Jim Carrey plays Joel, a man who arranges to have every memory of his ex-girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), erased from his brain, only to realize that those memories may be more dear to him than the failed union itself: They're all he's got left. ![]() This is French director Michel Gondry's second full-length movie, written by Charlie Kaufman (with whom Gondry also collaborated on his first picture, the 2000 "Human Nature"). If you've ever had a dream in which you're painfully aware of having lost something, or someone, but you have no idea what or who has slipped away from you - a dream in which an absence is a presence, a cookie-cutter-shaped hole moving like a ghost in the space around you - you'll understand "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" intuitively. ![]()
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