Film Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Heralded screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's latest story takes us through an intriguing, quasi-science fiction exploration of nothing less than the influence and emotional impact of memory upon our persons and how it -- and therefore the past -- can come to define and embody us as we live in the present.

Much like Kaufman's previous works Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind gives us a twisted reality that conveys familiar everyday images but sequences it all irregularly until the fabric is stretched to unnatural limits. The prevalent feeling of displacement is key to allowing Kaufman room to posit his story and characters' boundaries in a fresh and non-traditional manner that plays out like a melancholy fairy tale.

Delineating an absolute message or purpose to the film can be difficult, but just as art in a museum can often be variedly interpreted, Sunshine can be many things to many people. Is it a treatise on memory repression? A rebuke of technology gone too far? An attempt to define what humanity remains apart from a base of internalized experiences? And what of genre categorization: Is it science fiction? Romance? Black comedy? It could readily be any of these things, and it is up to the individual viewer to decide what to accept and what to deny.

What most likely cannot be denied, however, is the film's awesome ability to hold grasp of your mind and elicit a very real introspection on your own part. This is due largely to a striking aesthetic that continually challenges concepts of reality and incorporeal existence through the unsettling use of object-mismatching, detail-obscuring, and time-skipping.

Contributing to Sunshine's flair is an impeccable sense of style that is at once imperturbable in how it can treat its quirky subjects to the point of disposability, and yet, to the viewer, creative in how it invents a highly memorable imaging of surreality that swims in murkiness. Somehow it maintains an atmosphere that never sinks the movie into terrifying bouts of madness and depression; instead it feels more like a quiet night on empty streets spent in angst-ridden introspection, which is in fact an idea embodied thusly in an early scene in the film.

Most importantly, this dark, moody attitude of Sunshine actually blankets and slowly reveals an emerging warmth that champions the humanity that survives even in the lowest depths of life and cherishes that communion of souls so vital to the human experience.

Score: 8.0