Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Steve Murray

"A Funny / melancholy mindbender about love and memory."

Chicago Sun-Times

Roger Ebert

"It's one thing to wash that man right outta your hair, and another to erase him from your mind. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind imagines a scientific procedure that can obliterate whole fields of memory – so that, for example, Clementine can forget that she ever met Joel, let alone fell in love with him. "Is there any danger of brain damage?" the inventor of the process is asked. "Well," he allows, in his most kindly voice, "technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage." The movie is a labyrinth created by the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, whose Being John Malkovich and Adaptation were neorealism compared to this. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play Joel and Clementine, in a movie that sometimes feels like an endless series of aborted Meet Cutes. That they lose their minds while all about them are keeping theirs is a tribute to their skill; they center their characters so that we can actually care about them even when they're constantly losing track of their own lives. ("My journal," Joel observes oddly, "is … just blank.")

The movie is a radical example of Maze Cinema, that style in which the story coils back upon itself, redefining everything and then throwing it up in the air and redefining it again. To reconstruct it in chronological order would be cheating, but I will cheat: At some point before the technical beginning of the movie, Joel and Clementine were in love, and their affair ended badly, and Clementine went to Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) at Lacuna Inc., to have Joel erased from her mind.

Discovering this, Joel in revenge applies to have his memories of her erased. But the funny thing about love is, it can survive the circumstances of its ending; we remember good times better than bad ones, and Joel decides in mid-process that maybe he would like to remember Clementine after all. He tries to squirrel away some of his memories in hidden corners of his mind, but the process is implacable.

If you think this makes the movie sound penetrable, you have no idea. As the movie opens, Joel is seized with an inexplicable compulsion to ditch work and take the train to Montauk, and on the train he meets Clementine. For all they know they have never seen each other before, but somehow there's a connection, a distant shadow of deja vu. During the course of the film, which moves freely, dizzyingly, forward and backward in time, they will each experience fragmentary versions of relationships they had, might have had, or might be having. Meanwhile, back at the Lacuna head office, there are more complications.

Lacuna (www.lacunainc.com) seems to be a prosperous and growing firm (it advertises a Valentine's Day Special), but in reality, it consists only of the avuncular Dr. Mierzwiak and his team of assistants: Stan (Mark Ruffalo), Patrick (Elijah Wood) and Mary (Kirsten Dunst). There are innumerable complications involving them, which I will not describe because it would not only be unfair to reveal the plot but probably impossible.

Eternal Sunshine has been directed by Michel Gondry, a music video veteran whose first feature, Human Nature (2002), also written by Kaufman, had a lunacy that approached genius and then veered away. In that film, Tim Robbins starred as an overtrained child who devotes his adult life to teaching table manners to white mice. The scene where the male mouse politely pulls out the chair for the female to sit down is without doubt in a category of its own.

Despite jumping through the deliberately disorienting hoops of its story, Eternal Sunshine has an emotional center, and that's what makes it work. Although Joel and Clementine ping-pong through various stages of romance and reality, what remains constant is the human need for love and companionship, and the human compulsion to keep seeking it, despite all odds. It may also be true that Joel and Clementine, who seem to be such opposites (he is shy and compulsive, she is extroverted and even wild), might be a good match for each other, and so if they keep on meeting they will keep on falling in love, and Lacuna Inc. may have to be replaced with the Witness Protection Program.

For Jim Carrey, this is another successful attempt, like The Truman Show and the underrated The Majestic, to extend himself beyond screwball comedy. He has an everyman appeal, and here he dials down his natural energy to give us a man who is so lonely and needy that a fragment of memory is better than none at all. Kate Winslet is the right foil for him, exasperated by Joel's peculiarities while paradoxically fond of them. The shenanigans back at Lacuna belong on a different level of reality, but even there, secrets are revealed that are oddly touching.

Kaufman's mission seems to be the penetration of the human mind. His characters journeyed into the skull of John Malkovich, and there is a good possibility that two of them were inhabiting the same body in Adaptation. But both of those movies were about characters trying to achieve something outside themselves. The insight of Eternal Sunshine is that, at the end of the day, our memories are all we really have, and when they're gone, we're gone."

Chicago Tribune

Marc Caro

"Charlie Kaufman writes heady movies about the heart. His resume – Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Adaptation and now Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – offers a trick bag of off-kilter views into the disgruntled male soul.

Eternal Sunshine features another one of Kaufman's muttering, self-critical protagonists, Joel Barish. Unreformed extrovert Jim Carrey has the role, though he might seem the least likely guy to inhabit the skin of yet another Kaufman creation who tends to recede into his own skin.

But Carrey, bless him, has curbed his look-at-me tendencies to turn in his most convincing dramatic performance. As Joel, he does less acting with his eyes than in any previous movie, which is a good thing, particularly since director Michel Gondry (Human Nature) often thrusts his camera right up to the actor's nose.

The metaphysical curveball tossed by Kaufman is that Joel discovers that his ex-girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), has undergone a newfangled procedure to erase him from her memories. Distraught that she no longer recognizes or responds to him, Joel decides to retaliate and have her wiped from his mind as well.

But as he lies in a state of induced sleep, his mind clings to memories of Clementine even as technicians played by Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood attempt to zap them. The tug-of_war grows more fierce as the last traces of Clementine are in danger of disappearing.

As usual, Kaufman has come up with an intriguing, left-field way of dealing with relatable, thorny feelings. As the pioneering Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) explains to Joel, "Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage."

Practically speaking, the procedure represents another kind of damage: Memories and experiences are what make us who we are, so deleting them, the movie prods us to think, is a way of denying our own lives.

Kaufman has taken his title from Alexander Pope's poem "Eloisa to Abelard," which includes the lines, "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 resigned."

Eternal Sunshine is always engaging, never boring. You constantly appreciate Kaufman's intelligence and Gondry's lively filmmaking, which favors hand-held cameras and energetic cutting while eschewing computer graphics for in-camera optical effects.

Kaufman is especially sharp with off-handed observations, such as Clementine's aversion to the word "nice," or Joel's grumbling, "Sand is overrated. It's just tiny little rocks."

The supporting cast, which also includes Kirsten Dunst as the doctor"s admiring receptionist, is rock-solid, and it's a joy to watch Winslet cut loose after a series of serious roles (The Life of David Gale, Iris). With a flirtatious impulsiveness and hair that takes on various cotton-candy shades, Clementine is the life of the party, if a complicated one.

Yet Eternal Sunshine may be easier to admire than to fall for. It's got memorable images, such as Joel and Clementine lying atop cracked ice looking at the night sky, as well as contrived ones, like the bit with Joel imagining himself as a kid in an oversized kitchen.

Hooking you with an introductory segment that lasts more than 15 minutes before the opening titles, the movie is constructed in a way that invites you to mentally reassemble it. But once you piece together the puzzle – which doesn't take much effort if you're paying attention – you may find the picture offers less than expected.

For one, I doubt most viewers are predisposed to think that erasing all memories of their deepest love relationships is a good idea, so we're less inclined than Joel to be seduced by the procedure or to invest much in its outcome. Likewise, a twist involving Dunst's character may be interesting, but it, like too much of the material involving the technicians and doctor, never carries much weight.

On the flip side, Kaufman finally has come up with a resolution that raises a movie's emotional ante instead of dissipating it. The satisfying payoff crystallizes Kaufman's themes without simplifying the characters' feelings and desires.

Joel and Clementine are never more alive for us than in those final compelling minutes. As Kaufman and Gondry know all too well, we humans function best with some clouds in the sky and spots on our minds."