There’s so much going on in Eternal Sunshine that the bizarre love story at the center of it all is obscured. We’re focusing on the crazy memory erasure gone awry, watching Jim Carrey run through these distortions of scenes we had already witnessed sometimes minutes earlier, and some of the sweetness gets lots. The movie deserves (and has received) loads of credit for the innovations made just in terms of plot structure and realization, and low budget effects that director Michel Gondry is able to pull off in a way suitable to the odd material. The characters of Joel and Clementine, especially for their time (hard to believe this came out almost 10 years ago), seemed fresh and new to cinematic storytelling.
But one reason this movie is so adored is its heart, detailing the budding of a new relationship, only to see it fall apart to the point where both parties are so scarred that they want to forget it ever happened. The story of their meeting and blossoming as co-people—let’s not put a label on it please—is sweetly done, but the reconciliation, where they put the pieces back together, is the real stuff of romance here. Although perhaps it’s better describe as their decision to go beyond romance, to realize that the expectation that two people will click and everything they learn about each other from that point will be peachy is the stuff of fools, that happily ever after involves a lot of time spent annoyed with one another. But that’s ok!
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