Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) on Netflix
After his girlfriend erases him from her memory, a heartbroken man undergoes the same procedure, only to realize partway through that he wants to keep her.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb8.3/101,196,530 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
Joel Barish learns that his girlfriend, Clementine Kruczynski, has had all memory of their turbulent relationship erased by a company called Lacuna, and in his hurt he decides to undergo the same procedure himself.
As the erasure proceeds while he sleeps, Joel relives his memories of Clementine in reverse order, from their final fight back toward how they met, and partway through he realizes he does not want to lose her after all. He begins trying to hide her inside memories where the procedure was never meant to reach, unsettling the rest of his own mind in the process.
Michel Gondry directs a script by Charlie Kaufman, for Focus Features, Anonymous Content and This Is That Productions. Jim Carrey plays Joel Barish, with Kate Winslet as Clementine, Kirsten Dunst as Mary, Mark Ruffalo as Stan and Elijah Wood as Patrick. It runs 148 minutes and is rated R.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
To film the ocean washing away the house in Montauk, the production built a corner of a house on the beach and let the tide rise. The team hired to place the set in the water refused over the danger, so Michel Gondry fired them and had his actors and producers do it; the union chief reprimanded him.- Kate Winslet received the role of Clementine after she was the only actress to offer criticism of the script instead of pandering to the writers; when another actress won an Oscar and the studio tried to make Gondry use her instead, he threatened to walk from the project.
- Jim Carrey said that a year before shooting began, shortly after a breakup, Michel Gondry found his emotional state "so beautiful, so broken" that he asked Carrey to stay that way for one year to fit the character.
- Pierre Bismuth conceived the idea of erasing people from minds when a friend complaining about her boyfriend said yes on being asked whether she would erase him from her memory. He had planned an art experiment sending people cards saying someone had erased them, but never carried it out.
- To get a restrained performance from Jim Carrey, Michel Gondry would not allow him to improvise, a restriction he did not place on the other cast members, and put him off balance by giving misleading orders or rolling the camera at the wrong time. Carrey objected.
- Michel Gondry had earlier thought of casting Björk as Clementine, but she feared she would be emotionally affected and rejected the invitation after reading the script; Winona Ryder also met Gondry about the role.
- Nicolas Cage was Michel Gondry's original choice to play Joel, but Cage was unavailable, as he was in high demand from independent directors after his performance in Leaving Las Vegas.
- Charlie Kaufman became worried after Christopher Nolan released Memento (2000), which similarly deals with memory, and tried to pull out of the project, but Steve Golin of Propaganda Films, who had purchased it, made him complete it.
