Looking at advertisements for Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and given Jim Carrey’s role in the film I assumed that it would show a goofy, generic Carrey film, typical of many that he has starred in before, offering nothing original, lacking in substance and leaving the audience feeling generally unfulfilled. Well, it certainly isn’t. Not only does this film burst with a vibrant, warm and constantly inventive flavour but it fuses two very interesting genres, a hybrid or romance and science fiction.
The film, essentially, is based around Tennyson’s idea that, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. It is the story of a couple. The couple struggle, break up and lobby for the services of a mysterious company, ‘Lacuna’. Lacuna is a company which erases the painful memories of a person’s life, the protagonists want to erase the relationship from their minds, meaning that the couple potentially forget each other forever. We follow as Joel (one half of the couple, played by Jim Carrey) journeys through his own memories with his partner. We see the ups and the downs and his desperation to retain his memories, though at times painful.
