When Jim finds out about this, he is distraught he decides he needs to get his memories of her wiped as well. One day, after walking out on Jim, Kate has her memories of him wiped. So, Jim Carrey (pitch-perfect: unusually subdued, rather morose in fact, but also without the heavyhanded seriousness of his previous efforts to “act” in films like The Truman Show) and Kate Winslet (manic and overbearing, but engagingly and believably so) are a couple who break up: they love each other, but also get on each other’s nerves and wear themselves down through constant bickering. (They chase down emotional memories that pop out in green from an MRI scan photo on the computer, as if they were killing enemies in a computer game).
As presented in the film, this technology is hilariously sleazy and tacky - it’s done overnight in your bedroom, while you sleep, and the techs party, have sex, and drink up all your liquor, while they are supposedly monitoring the state of your brain on their laptops. You can forget everything about an unhappy love affair, forget even the other person’s existence, with nothing else being affected. The premise is a technology that allows you to selectively erase your memories. But the manner of presentation is frequently surprising. It’s not that the plot contains any real surprises, once you accept its outrageous premise. It’s hard to talk about the film without, to some extent, giving it away.
But to call the film “clever” is a bit unfair such a characterization doesn’t do justice to the way its affect is simultaneously goofy and heartfelt. As you’d expect from Charlie Kaufman, form trumps content, in a cleverly self-referential way. It manages to be both funny and poignant, and to feel fresh even though it’s recycling some fairly hoary chestnuts of romantic comedy. I loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the new Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry film.
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