Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Michel Gondry
Jim Carrey
Kate Winslet
Gerry Robert Byrne
Elijah Wood
Thomas Jay Ryan
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
On Valentine's Day, 2004, Joel Barish awakens in his New York City apartment feeling hung over. Driven by an inexplicable urgency, he rushes to catch a train to Montauk, Long Island. There, despite the cold, he wanders the beach and writes in his journal, too shy to approach a girl with hair dyed electric blue, who catches his eye. They are on the same train home, however, and the extroverted girl, Clementine Kruczynski, launches into a conversation with Joel that is both stilted and oddly familiar. Clem's quick temper frustrates Joel, who pulls away but later offers her a ride home and accompanies her into her apartment. Overwhelmed by his attraction to her quirkiness and candor, Joel leaves, but as soon as he gets home he calls her, and the next night she takes him to the frozen Charles River to lie on the ice. Over the course of the night, they fall in love, he enthralled with her liveliness and she drawn to his kindness. In the morning, Joel drives Clem home, and while she runs inside, Patrick, a stranger to Joel, asks him why he is there, then walks away. Two days earlier, Joel, deeply grieving over his breakup with Clem, takes a pill prescribed to him by Dr. Howard Mierzwiak of Lacuna, Inc. and, as planned, is soon comatose. Patrick and Stan Fink, Lacuna employees, enter his apartment and set up their equipment, which causes Joel to relive his memories of Clem, beginning with their breakup: Two days before Valentine's Day, he visits his friends Carrie and Rob Eakin to lament that Clem is acting as if she does not know him. Rob reluctantly hands Joel a card from Lacuna, which states that Clem has had him erased from her memory. Horrified, Joel visits the Lacuna offices, where Howard explains that Clem has opted to have all memories of Joel removed from her brain. Joel leaves but, devastated, returns soon after to demand that Howard perform the procedure on him, to remove Clem. Howard directs him to bring to the office everything associated with her, which they will use to create a "map" of his memories in his brain, after which the technicians will come to his house and overnight remove the memories. Later, back at the office, Stan maps Joel's brain, but when in the present, one of the Lacuna machine's wires malfunctions and the inexperienced Patrick fumbles with the plugs, Joel's memories grow staticky, and his emerging consciousness allows him to enter his own memory. Disoriented and frightened, Joel questions Howard and finds that, within his own memory, he can comment on the occasion and watch it unfold. His two realities continue to blur as Joel simultaneously hears Patrick in the present discussing his new girl friend, and reexperiences his last fight with Clem: She comes home late, drunk, and reveals that she crashed his car. Both furious and fed up, they fight, and after Joel insinuates that she sleeps around to entice people to like her, Clem stalks out. He follows her down the street, but as cars drop from the sky, Joel announces to Clem that he is in the process of erasing her. In the present, Patrick, drinking beers with Stan, admits that after erasing Clem's memory the week earlier, he fell in love with and began dating her. Hearing Patrick, Joel's discomfort grows, but then Stan begins removing a previous memory, and Joel relives the moment when Clem, characteristically feeling trapped and irritated, leaves to go drinking alone. Then in an earlier memory, they fight over her desire to have a baby, and Clem is insulted that Joel does not consider her equipped to be a good mother. That memory begins to disintegrate, while in the apartment, Lacuna receptionist Mary Svevo arrives to spend the evening with Stan, her boyfriend. The three Lacuna employees raid the unconscious Joel's liquor cabinet, Stan confident that the machine is on "autopilot," while Joel courses through the next memories, including a dinner during which he worries that Clem drinks too much and they have little left to say to each other. From within the recollection Joel hears Patrick talking to his girl friend on the phone, and realizes that she is Clem. Patrick leaves to visit Clem, who, confused and frightened, sobs that "nothing makes any sense." Secretly consulting the journal pages he has stolen from Joel's bag of mementos, Patrick uses Joel's past words to seduce Clem into loving him. Puzzled as to why Patrick, who says all the right things, makes her uncomfortable, she insists they visit the Charles. Meanwhile, Joel, recalling a day when Clem is tender and vulnerable, tries desperately to hold on to the memory, but instead is brought back to their first night on the frozen Charles, and relives the feeling of perfect happiness. At the same time, Patrick is on the Charles reciting Joel's words to Clem, but she reacts with distaste. In Joel's mind, he and Clem discuss how they can stop the erasure process, and on her suggestion, he manages to wake himself up. When that fails to work, she proposes that they hide her in a memory not mapped out by Lacuna, and he brings her back into his childhood. In his mother's kitchen, Clem appears as a neighbor while Joel is at once his current self and his four-year-old incarnation. Just then, Stan realizes that the machinery has stopped, and stoned on marijuana and panicked, follows Mary's advice to call Howard. The doctor arrives and, shocked that Joel is proving resistant to the technology, manages to "find" him again on the brainwave chart. Joel remembers watching a drive-in movie with Clem and making up the words, but when the car falls apart around them, he grabs her hand and runs, as the ground crumbles behind them. Clem exhorts him to find a more deeply buried memory, so Joel takes her to a moment of humiliation, when his mother caught him masturbating. This proves unsuccessful, so they move on to a more painful memory, when childhood bullies forced him to hammer a bird to death. Clem, now a child too, marches Joel out of the playground, but as they play by his house, it melts away, Howard having found him once again. In the apartment, Stan grows jealous over Mary's attentions to Howard and so goes outside, and soon Mary gives in to her adoration of the doctor and kisses him. Howard tries weakly to resist, but then kisses her, not realizing that his wife Hollis has driven up and is watching through the window with Stan. Stan honks his horn, and Howard and Mary run outside to placate Hollis, but she informs Mary that this is not the first time she has kissed Howard. Trapped, Howard admits that after a failed romance between them, Mary asked to have him removed from her memory. Feeling violated, Mary returns to the office to search for the tape recording Howard made of her verbal memories. Meanwhile, Joel is remembering the day after he met Clem, when he goes to the bookstore where she works. She is at first distant as she informs him, in the past, that she will not be his savior, then kind when he confesses, in the present, that he has always wanted her to be. As the book titles fade around them, she urges him to remember her. Finally, Joel experiences again the day they met, at a beach party in Montauk. During the memory, both are aware that this is the last memory remaining, and try to enjoy its sweetness. He watches with trepidation and admiration as she breaks into an empty house, and although he leaves her there alone, in the present he is able to return to proclaim his love. As the house falls into ruins, she whispers to him to meet her in Montauk, and soon, the procedure is finished. The next morning, Valentine's Day, Joel awakens in his apartment feeling hung over, then, driven by an inexplicable urgency, rushes to catch a train to Montauk. He meets Clem on the train, and two mornings later, she leaves his car to get her toothbrush and Patrick knocks on Joel's window. On her way back out, Clem grabs her mail, in which she finds an envelope from Mary, who has returned all of Lacuna's clients' audio tapes. In the car, Clem and Joel listen to Clem, weeks earlier, discussing the reasons why she wants to erase Joel, and Joel reacts with fear and disgust, causing Clem to leave the car. She soon drives to his apartment, however, where she finds him listening to his own tape. They try to ignore the terrible statements on the tapes, but Clem, realizing how badly their old relationship ended, decides to leave. Joel follows her, however, and proposes they try again. As she counters that they already know what will go wrong and how, Clem realizes that even with the uncertainty and possibility of failure, their love is worth another try, and their memories worth rebuilding.
Director
Michel Gondry
Cast
Jim Carrey
Kate Winslet
Gerry Robert Byrne
Elijah Wood
Thomas Jay Ryan
Mark Ruffalo
Jane Adams
David Cross
Kirsten Dunst
Tom Wilkinson
Ryan Whitney
Debbon Ayer
Brian Price
Amir Ali Said
Paul Litowsky
Josh Flitter
Lola Daehler
Deirdre O'connell
Crew
Peter Agliata
Danny Aiello Iii
Sebastian Almeida
Billy Anagnos
Bob Andres
Ray Angelic
Stefanie Azpiazu
Tricia Barrett
Steve Bartek
Alison Barton
Hilary Basing
Edward Battista
Ryan Beadle
Kenny Becker
Nick Bell
Angela Bellisio
Braden Belmonte
Angela Beresford
Fred Berger
Christine Bergren
Charles-auguste De Beriot
Georges Bermann
Mark Bero
Tom Biller
Pierre Bismuth
Elizabeth Bonaventura
Dotan Bonen
James Boniece
Dana Bourke
Anthony Bregman
Jon Brion
Kelly Britt
Christian Brockey
Garf Brown
Theodore A. Brown
Bobb Bruno
S. D. Burman
David Bushell
David Bushell
Brian Buteau
Steve Caldwell
Tony Campenni
John Canavan
Mel Cannon
Brian Cantaldi
Blythe Cappello
David Catalano
Kam Chan
Samuel Chase
Linda Chen
Salvatore Ciccone
Charles Clark
Peter Clores
Wendy Cohen
Benjamin Conable
Marko Costanzo
Lamont Crawford
Thomas Crehanm
Andrea Cronin-souza
Natasha Cuba
Mary Cybulski
Cara Czekanski
Paul Daley
Robert Darwell
Liesel Elain Davis
Timothy Delaughter
Ruth A. Deleon
Philip Derise
Stephanie Detiege
Paul George Divone
James Domorski
James Donahue
Kat Donahue
Mark Dornfeld
Natalie N. Dorset
Maureen Duffy
Michael C. Easter
Richie Eaton
Mike Eaves
Brent Ekstrand
Tracy Ershow
E. J. Evans
John Favre
Jerry Featherstone
Kathy Fellegara
Rich Fellegara
Scott Ferguson
Stanley Fernandez Jr.
Michele Ferrone
Chris Fielder
Anastassios Filipos
Stephanie Finochio
Frances Fiore
Raymond Flynn
Noah Fox
Lisa Frucht
D. Scott Gagnon
Martin Garner
William K. Gaskins
Adam Gass
Emily Gaunt
Eugene Gearty
Steve Golin
Michel Gondry
Irv Gooch
Andrew Goodman
Peter Gordon
William Gore Jr.
Jason Gossman
Jonathan Graham
Roman Greller
Carlos Guerra
Chad Gunderson
Kristy Hamer
Amro Hamzawi
Rj Harbour
Michael Hausman
James Haygood
Anne Beiser Haywood
Brent Haywood
Susan Hegarty
Cort Hessler Iii
Linda Fields Hill
Hollis James Hoff
Mary C. Hoffer
Chris Holmes
Shaina Holmes
Arthur Hur
Michael A. Jackman
Michael A. Jackman
Lindsey Jaffin
Miguel Jimenez
Roberto Jimenez
Drew Jiritano
D. Michelle Johnson
Joseph L. Johnson
Paul Kane
Cynthia Kao
Kate Karbowniczek
Charlie Kaufman
Charlie Kaufman
Charlie Kaufman
Erica Kay
Dennis J. Kelly
James F. Kelly
Mike Kennedy
Frank Kern
Ara Khanikian
Hinju Kim
Matthew G. King
Jill Kliber
David Koch
Zbigniew Kouros
Julius Kozlowski
Gordon Krause
Drew Kunin
Ellen Kuras
Kevin Ladson
Alexandre Lafortune
Mark Lane-davies
George Lara
Mélanie Larue
Mike Leather
Pierre-simon Lebrun-chaput
David C. Lee
Sage Lehman
Dan Leigh
Herb Lieberz
Scott Lieberz
Marissa Littlefield
Stéphane Loiselle
François Lord
Tommy Louie
Artie Malesci
Varma Malik
Christopher Marsh
Robert Marsh
Jeanne Mccarthy
Addy Mcclelland
Patrick Mcdonald
Kevin Mckenna
Jerry Mcmullan
Mike Melchiove
François Métivier
Hillary R. Meyer
Lori Miller
Nicholas R. Miller
Ronald Miller
Louis Morin
Tom Moyer
Scott P. Murphy
John Nadeau
Neeraj
Don Nelson
Kathy Nelson
Richard Nelson Jr.
Valerie Nolan
Alison Norod
Chris Norr
Martin Nowlan
Film Details
Technical Specs
Award Wins
Best Original Screenplay
Best Original Screenplay
Best Original Screenplay
Best Original Screenplay
Award Nominations
Best Actress
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
The film follows a complex time sequence, beginning on Valentine's Day, when "Joel Barish" meets "Clementine Kruczynski" for the first time after going through the memory erasing procedure, which takes place the previous evening. Over the course of that night, he remembers events that took place days, weeks and months earlier. The opening credits do not appear until seventeen minutes into the film, to signal the shift in time within the story from Valentine's Day (the "present") to the day earlier, hours before Joel has the procedure. The closing cast credits are listed in order of appearance, unlike the opening credits. Many scenes are narrated by Jim Carrey as Joel.
According to press notes and the DVD commentary by director Michel Gondry and writer Charlie Kaufman, the concept for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind began with an artist friend of Gondry, Pierre Bismuth, who wondered how friends would react if they received a card stating that they had been erased from his memories. Gondry and Kaufman developed the idea and pitched it to studios in 1998, after which Kaufman took several years to complete the screenplay. During that time, Gondry, a noted music video director, made his feature film directorial debut based on Kaufman's script for Human Nature. According to Filmtracker.com, Partizan, a division of the now-defunct production company Propaganda Films, signed the original deal linking Gondry and Kaufman to the film. Daily Variety announced in December 2001 that Focus Features (then called USA Films, and later called Universal Focus) was slated to produce the film. Focus also handled the picture's domestic distribution.
Carrey stated on the DVD that he received an early version of the script and requested to play Joel, a role that was, as many reviewers favorably noted, a departure from his typically frenetic onscreen persona. In the press notes, Kate Winslet stated that she played the "Jim Carrey part" and vice-versa. The title, as noted by the characters in the film, comes from an eighteenth-century Alexander Pope poem entitled "Eloisa to Abelard." In it, Eloisa (or Heloïse), a twelfth-century nun who had a famous love affair with the much older philosopher Peter Abelard, envies the nuns whose chastity shields them from love's suffering. The The Nation review pointed out that Kaufman also referenced the poem in his 1999 feature Being John Malkovich, during which the puppeteer performs Eloisa's story.
Kaufman planned the film to necessitate multiple viewings. In press materials, many cast and crew members commented on the director's flexible, creative approach to filmmaking, in which he often developed concepts while on the set. Budget restraints and Gondry's aesthetic preferences limited the use of digital special effects, necessitating many of the "effects" to be produced in-camera. For instance, in the DVD's special features Gondry illustrated the forced perspective camera technique and oversized props used in the "kitchen scene" to create the illusion that Carrey was a four-year-old. To portray visually Joel's crumbling memories, production designer Dan Leigh, director of photography Ellen Kuras and Gondry watched improperly stored film, and approximated the degradation effects. Press notes add that the art department researched real neurosurgical equipment at Mt. Sinai hospital in order to design the memory-erasing headgear.
The film was shot in New York, including in Yonkers, Williamsburg, Montauk and various New York City locations such as Grand Central Station. Gondry, a Frenchman, spent six months doing location scouting and preparation in order to become familiar with the city. The circus seen in the film was the Ringling Bros. Circus, which paraded their elephants through city streets one night during production. Paul Proch, who drew the sketches in Joel's notebook, was Kaufman's former writing partner.
Sources reported the film's budget as either $20 or $27 million, and Filmtracker.com stated that it cost $35 million. As of November 2004, Daily Variety reported the domestic gross to be more than $34 million. As noted by Hollywood Reporter in an April 2004 article, the release pattern for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind marked a new direction for independent, "art-house" films. Instead of holding the picture until the winter awards season, Focus elected to release it in March and then issue the video/DVD version in the fall. According to the Hollywood Reporter article, Focus felt that their bankable stars would keep the performances in the public's mind until awards season. Universal Studios Home Video released the DVD on September 28, 2004. In addition to commentary and interviews with Gondry, Kaufman and Carrey, the DVD featured deleted scenes, several of which address Joel's breakup with girl friend "Naomi." On January 4, 2005, the studio released a Collector's Edition DVD with additional extras such as more deleted scenes and a conversation between Winslet and Gondry. The extra scenes revealed that originally the character of "Mary Svevo" was to discover, upon listening to her Lacuna audio tapes, that "Dr. Howard Mierzwiak" had coerced her into having an abortion.
Reviews were mostly favorable, with some critics lauding the labyrithian plot and others stating that it was difficult to follow. Variety called Winslet "terrifically witty, spontaneous and emotionally transparent," and most reviews praised Carrey for an uncharacteristically restrained performance. In Entertainment Weekly, Winslet referred to the role as her "career high."
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was selected as one of AFI's top ten films of the year and won the National Board of Review's Best Original Screenplay and Special Recognition for Excellence in Filmmaking awards. Charlie Kaufman won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and Winslet received a nomination for Best Actress. Jon Brion received a Grammy award nomination for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, and Kaufman was the runner-up for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Best Screenplay award. In addition to many other accolades, the film was nominated for the following Golden Globe awards: Best Motion Picture-Musical or Comedy, Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture-Musical or Comedy (Winslet), Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture-Musical or Comedy (Jim Carry) and Best Screenplay-Motion Picture (Kaufman). Kaufman also received the Best Original Screenplay award from the Writers Guild.
Miscellaneous Notes
Winner of the 2004 award for Best Director by the Toronto Film Critics Association (TFCA).
Winner of the 2004 award for Best Original Screenplay and co-winner of the 2004 award for Special Recognition For Excellence In Filmmaking by the National Board of Review (NBR).
Winner of the 2004 award for Best Original Screenplay by the Seattle Film Critics.
Winner of the 2004 award for Screenwriter of the Year by the London Critics' Circle.
Winner of the 2004 awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay by the Toronto Film Critics Association.
Winner of the 2004 awards for Best Film, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Acting Ensemble by the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA).
Winner of the 2004 Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing in Domestic Feature - Dialogue & ADR by the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE).
Winner of the 2004 Writers Guild (WGA) award for Best Original Screenplay.
Winner of two 2004 awards including Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).
Released in United States Spring March 19, 2004
Released in United States on Video September 28, 2004
Partizan is the Paris/London based commercials/music video production company division of Propaganda.
Propaganda reportedly paid $1 million in a pay-or-play deal that attaches Gondry to direct and Kaufman to write the screenplay.
Propaganda Films went out of business on November 8, 2001.
ARRI
Fuji Film
Released in United States Spring March 19, 2004
Released in United States on Video September 28, 2004
Voted one of the 10 best films of 2004 by the American Film Institute (AFI).
