The best films are the ones that feel completely different every single time you watch them. This is going to be true of every film or piece of art you engage with, but the ones that stand out allow you to reflect not just on how your perception of the work has changed, but on how you have changed. Michel Gondry’s second film, 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is practically the paragon of works feel like brand-new experiences with every viewing. Its premise is simple: We follow two people across the expanse of a very long Valentine’s Day night, as each of them has the other surgically erased from their memory, but then has a change of heart. Like the best films written or directed by Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, that first viewing is bizarre and difficult to parse, but with each repeat effort, more and more layers and details float to the surface so clearly that you’ll wonder how you didn’t notice them before.
The best way to watch Eternal Sunshine, though, is with a few years in between viewings. Some of the finer details might become softer, but so much of what makes it affecting are embedded within its emotional landscape. It’s like a strange mirror, and if you take a few years between rewatches, it has the power to reflect back at you the person you were when you last saw the film, directly next to who you are today. Each watch feels like a playground for the psyche, giving you an excuse to check in with how you feel about the characters, who you relate the most to, and how you feel about certain people embedded in your memory who you might want to erase. Not only that, but its “reverse-corkscrew combined somehow with a Mobius strip” narrative means that each successive viewing means new chances to catch the ways the film’s first 20 minutes inform the next 90.
Essentially everyone involved in the film feels like an indispensable part of its greatness — you couldn’t make this without these people, at this stage of their careers. The fact that it took ages for it to actually get made is a testament to that timing. Nearly six years passed between noted cerebral weirdo Kaufman and his friend, music video maestro Michel Gondry, selling the idea of a sci-fi romance about post-breakup memory erasure to Steve Golin’s Propaganda Films and the film’s eventual release in 2004. Long enough for Kaufman to get spooked by Christopher Nolan’s amnesia thriller Memento and its mind-bending storytelling. Long enough that Gondry and Kaufman made an entirely different film together first, 2001’s mediocre Human Nature. Long enough that four different Kaufman-penned films got released before Eternal Sunshine. The dice were loaded against us ever seeing this film — who could have blamed the two for deciding to not try again after Human Nature? And yet, the strength of two of Kaufman’s films — the Spike Jonze hits Being John Malkovich and the quasi-autobiography Adaptation — helped launch him to the point where he and Gondry could get pretty much anyone they wanted for the roles of depressive, lovelorn Joel Barish and his ex-girlfriend Clementine Kruczynski.
It feels impossible to imagine anyone as Joel and Clementine besides Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, even though there’s an alternate universe in which they’re played by Gondry’s original choices, Nicolas Cage (who was busy making Leaving Las Vegas and Björk (who felt like she’d be too emotionally affected). Despite the fact that the plot revolves around Clementine erasing Joel from her memory, leading him to erase her, their chemistry feels so authentic. Even as the pair listens to recordings of themselves baring their most cruel, emotionally battered feelings about each other, you find yourself hoping that it’ll strengthen their love. The two dissolve into their roles to the point where they don’t even feel like the people that starred in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Titanic. This wasn’t Carrey’s first foray into more dramatic fare, but he exudes a deeper brokenness and sorrow in every frame than anything he pulled off in Man on the Moon, The Truman Show or the similarly amnesia-focused The Majestic. In voiceover, his internal monologue drips with melancholy, and even thinking about getting back together with his “last” ex sounds like it’ll reduce him to tears. “She was nice. Nice is good. She loved me.” Joel says, and you can feel the twinge of sorrow hanging in that second part, like there’s an implied “at least,” and it stings to hear.
None of that is an accident: Gondry seemed singularly focused on getting this performance out of Carrey. In 2017, Carrey revealed that Gondry had told him to stay inside his “so beautiful, so broken” post-breakup malaise for a year, so that he could fully embody Joel’s sadsackery. Gondry also allowed the entire cast of the film to have the freedom to improvise and go off-script, but forbade Carrey from doing so in the slightest. He was even barred from improvising his movements. Frankly, it’s fucked up to go to such lengths to throw an actor off their axis, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t get results.
In a lot of ways, nearly everything we witness in Eternal Sunshine is a visualization of Joel’s psychic wounds. We spend a lot of time watching Joel’s recollections of the worst and, later, best moments of his and Clementine’s relationship, and are forced to experience them as they’re being erased. This is where Eternal Sunshine truly sings: Every shot of Joel’s psyche begs to be dissected by film nerds — the detailed sets, the heavy use of forced perspective and the Godard-like camera techniques, Jon Brion’s enthralling score (and the soundtrack full of Polyphonic Spree and Electric Light Orchestra jams), the innovative sound design and off-kilter lighting techniques. The film depicts memory in such a way that you have to wonder why it hasn’t been emulated more in the last two decades. Cars plummet from the sky and dissolve, faces vanish and restaurant doorways lead into living rooms, all signs that the impending absence of Clementine is unraveling Joel’s entire world. It’s kinda pathetic, and yeah, maybe you might want to yell at him to suck it up. At the same time, though, the fact that reliving the cruelest moments of their relationship doesn’t change his desire to still remember her speaks to how deeply embedded in who he is she’s become.
Of all the characters in Kaufman films, few have been dissected as thoroughly as Clementine. Winslet spent the years between Titanic and Eternal Sunshine doing small pictures and period films, and you can see in her performance that she’s reveling in the chance to play someone as complicated and, yes, modern as Clementine. Youth is watching this film and recognizing but still romanticizing the fucked-up relationship that Clementine and Joel have — but wisdom is taking to heart her character’s sharp rebuke of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. Startlingly, she did so mere months before Zach Braff unleashed the insipid Garden State on the world, giving birth to the most classic example of the character type. Clementine is a mess of a human: loud, impulsive, constantly drinking. As we wander through Joel’s memories, we’re constantly forced to see everything through Joel’s eyes, but the film constantly interrogates how he views Clementine’s faults. “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive,” says Clementine, her voice dripping with the same venom we’d hear a decade later in Rosamund Pike’s “Cool Girl” monologue in Gone Girl, “But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.”
It’s a miracle, then, that despite how nihilistic and depressive Eternal Sunshine is, it still feels unabashedly romantic. As we’re meeting Joel and Clementine for the first time, we’re watching their memories of each other being erased, and we realize that even oblivion can’t undo the magnetic pull of their love, however damaged it may be. On rewatch, the message is clear: You cannot truly erase a memory. “Memory” is too complicated and wild, and even if you could jettison the brain’s memory of something, it would be impossible to erase the ways our emotions feel in our muscles and skin. You can forget the time your boyfriend told you he loved you, but you can’t erase the memory of your heart skipping a beat. It’s why Patrick’s (Elijah Wood) attempts to steal Joel’s romantic identity fizzle out: Clementine knows what Joel’s “I’ve never felt this way” speech felt like, even if she doesn’t remember Joel — just like she knows what it felt like to hear something described as “nice.”
Carrey and Winslet take up almost all the runtime of Eternal Sunshine, but it would be a crime to not talk about all the other wonderful and bizarre performances that surround them. The team at memory-erasure company Lacuna is a different shade of bonkers, with even more warped relationships that all feel like trademarks of Kaufman’s screenplays. Take, for instance, Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Svevo, the Lacuna receptionist whose relationship with Stan (Mark Ruffalo) isn’t stopping her from being strangely obsessed with Lacuna founder Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson). Rounding out the bunch is the worst of them, Wood’s predatory Patrick, who helps Stan to erase Clementine’s memory but steals the relationship detritus she brings to be destroyed (and some of her goddamn underwear!), hoping to get her to fall in love with him. These actors are given a pretty narrow band of emotional intelligence to work with, but they feel completely real.
20 years on, Eternal Sunshine has been devoured from every single angle, its messages thoroughly decoded by the breathless film nerds who can’t get over just how impressive it is, both as a unique and complex look at a faulty relationship and as a work of striking visual art. It’s impossible to truly take it all in at once — but, again, maybe that’s because it unveils more of itself to you as you grow and your perspectives shift. It’s also just because there’s something so beautiful about a film that shows the wild and weird and messy ways that love can find you again, and again, and again, just as long as your heart is open to it. “Change your heart/ Look around you,” Beck pleads gently in his rendition of “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime,” which we hear throughout the film, and it feels as much directed at Joel as at the audience, begging us to avoid the simple route of emotional stagnancy. But take that message to heart. Change your heart. It will astound you. Who knows what you’ll uncover in the film, and yourself, the next time you watch it.
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