Charlie Kaufman's screenplay, Michel Gondry's direction, Jim Carrey's quietest performance. One of the great romances of the 21st century.
Joel Barish wakes up one morning, on impulse skips work, and takes a train to Montauk. On the beach he meets a woman with blue hair — Clementine. They fall into easy conversation. Within hours they're back at her apartment. The film then reveals that Joel and Clementine had been in a long, painful relationship that ended weeks earlier — and that Clementine, devastated by the break-up, had hired a company called Lacuna to surgically erase her memories of Joel.
When Joel learns this, he hires Lacuna to do the same to himself. Most of the film takes place inside Joel's head during the procedure, as Joel, increasingly aware of what's happening, tries to hide his memories of Clementine from being erased. The film's structure is the central premise: a romance experienced backwards, from heartbreak to first meeting.
Charlie Kaufman's screenplay is the film's primary creative achievement. He had previously written Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation. (2002), both films in which the structure was the trick. Eternal Sunshine is the film in which the structure carries genuine emotional weight rather than primarily comic disorientation.
The screenplay works as a romance because the audience meets Joel and Clementine at the end of their relationship, watches them grow back together through the procedure, and arrives — at the film's chronological beginning — at the original moment of attraction. The cumulative effect is the opposite of the standard romance: the audience knows how it ends before it begins, which makes the beginning more painful, not less.
Carrey's career had, by 2004, included Ace Ventura, The Mask, Liar Liar, and The Truman Show. Eternal Sunshine is the film in which he played a character whose primary attribute is self-contained sadness. Joel is shy, anxious, depressive. He sits on the train at the film's opening for the entire trip without saying a word.
The performance is the most disciplined of Carrey's career, and the most unsung. The scene of Joel hiding inside one of his own childhood memories — physically the size of a four-year-old, watching adult Clementine talk to his adult self about his mother — is one of the most strange and beautiful pieces of acting in 2000s American cinema.
Michel Gondry, a music-video director, brought a practical-effects sensibility to the memory-erasure sequences that distinguishes the film from any subsequent imitator. Memories dissolve through in-camera tricks: lights go out as Joel and Clementine walk past them, walls fall away, sets change while characters move. Almost nothing is CGI.
The technique gives the dream-erasure scenes a tactile quality that digital effects can't match. The sequences feel like memories rather than visualisations of memories. Gondry's eye is the reason the film is rewatchable — Kaufman's screenplay would have worked in less able hands, but the film's strangeness is Gondry's.