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"    Memory is the source of sorrow, pain, joy, regret, and life itself in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which, today, on its tenth anniversary, remains that rare high-concept romantic comedy to understand love in all its alternately amazing and ugly forms. One of the decade&amp;#039;s truly original heartbreakers, Michel Gondry&amp;#039;s 2004 film nabbed its screenwriter Charlie Kaufman a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, inspired countless works of melancholic whimsy \u2014 be it the meta-mushy Stranger Than Fiction, the musical (500) Days of Summer, or this past winter&amp;#039;s ode to techno-love and longing, Her \u2014 and, in Kate Winslet&amp;#039;s hair-dying Clementine, helped set the cinematic template for the legion of quirky, Zooey Deschanel-ish Manic Pixie Dream Girls to come. The story of a man who, in retaliation for his ex-girlfriend using a service that erases unwanted memories, attempts to permanently blot all traces of her out of his mind, it&amp;#039;s a portrait of the way passion fades, the desperate desire to avoid suffering, and the fundamental role that shame and misery play in the construction of the self \u2014 and one that&amp;#039;s made all the more poignant for its ability, amid sadness, to locate genuine hope. Technically, Eternal Sunshine is still a marvel of crosscutting, scene-blending virtuosity. Gondry seamlessly segues from memory to memory, often within individual scenes, with an associative deftness that bestows thrilling momentum upon his tale. That begins with Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) meeting cute on a gray, windswept Montauk beach, then heading out to a frozen Charles River where they lie on the ice and stare at the stars, in the process falling headfirst into a romance. From the outset, though, their union is awash in warning signs, be it Joel&amp;#039;s reserved-to-the-point-of-antisocial demeanor, or motormouthed Clem&amp;#039;s offhand confession, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t tell from one moment to the next what I&amp;#039;m gonna like.&amp;quot; They&amp;#039;re a mismatched pair, he introverted and modest, she wild and frantic. And yet in Carrey and Winslet&amp;#039;s skilled hands, they never come off as a contrived match; rather, Joel&amp;#039;s shy &amp;quot;niceness&amp;quot; fills a hole in Clem&amp;#039;s unhinged heart, just as her unruliness jumpstarts Joel&amp;#039;s dour soul. A prologue that details their initial amour is ended by a transitional fade to the sight of Joel weeping in a car. Shortly thereafter, he discovers that Clem \u2014 who&amp;#039;d recently broken things off \u2014 has had him expunged from her memory via a service offered by local medical outfit Lacuna Coil. Joel soon endeavors to do likewise to her. However, for all the reassurances given by the business&amp;#039;s founder Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and lead technician Stan (Mark Ruffalo), Joel, once he&amp;#039;s been drugged and hooked up to a giant hair dryer-looking machine, discovers that the deletion of his Clem-related memories means losing not just the bad but the good as well. Thus, endeavoring to preserve his fond recollections of her, Joel attempts to hide Clem deep in his subconscious where Mierzwiak and Stan won&amp;#039;t be able to find (and, thus, remove) her.      Gondry visualizes this material with a free-flowing computerized precision that he&amp;#039;d hone with his subsequent The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind. And Kaufman, who traversed similar terrain with Adaptation and the peerless Synecdoche, New York, plumbs issues of identity and interiority with a sharpness that&amp;#039;s at once piercing \u2014 as when Joel muses with self-loathing, &amp;quot;Why do I fall in love with every woman who shows me the least bit of attention?&amp;quot; \u2014 and still deeply empathetic to his protagonists&amp;#039; personal and romantic anxieties. Joel&amp;#039;s cognitive journey takes him through both euphoric and combative times with Clem, and later to those dark, shameful places in his past, where Clem becomes privy to him getting caught masturbating as a teen, or being forced by bullying kids to hammer an injured bird to death. It&amp;#039;s there that Eternal Sunshine conveys the essentiality of unhappiness, humiliation, and regret in people&amp;#039;s basic makeup. Gondry and Kaufman recognize that those ugly experiences and emotions are fundamental building blocks in Joel&amp;#039;s (and, by extension, everyone&amp;#039;s) development, as vital to who he is as the blissful memory he relives of taking a bath as a child in a bubbly kitchen sink. As with Her, Eternal Sunshine uses its sci-fi conceit to investigate the more universal nature of bliss, longing, and loss. Those are topics Gondry further touches upon through subplots involving Lacuna Coil secretary Mary (Kirstin Dunst), romantically tangled up with both Dr. Mierzwiak and Stan, as well as technician Patrick (Elijah Wood), who&amp;#039;s struck up a relationship with the newly blank Clem. Those peripheral threads echo the primary plot&amp;#039;s depiction of romantic distress, and the eagerness with which people flee it. And they also speak to the film&amp;#039;s ultimate belief in the irrepressibility of love, the way that, when authentic, it can&amp;#039;t be obliterated or forgotten \u2014 or, for that matter, manufactured via ruse, as Patrick attempts to do with Clem. Which isn&amp;#039;t to say that Eternal Sunshine betrays itself for a neat-and-tidy happily-ever-after. Instead, this enduring gem admits to life&amp;#039;s messiness, and to the perhaps inevitable demise of even those relationships that begin most promisingly, and yet nonetheless embraces the thrilling hope that blossoms from new love, a feeling that&amp;#039;s akin to excitedly sliding across a frozen lake&amp;#039;s thin ice. Originally posted at esquire.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a10238/eternal-sunshine-10-years-later-1395254651/>