A low-budget science-fiction original movie that tells the story of a group of friends who are carrying out several engineering Physics experiments in a garage and discover, by accident, time travel.
The director and main actor is Shane Carruth, an ex-engineer who also wrote the script, and made the music! His family and friends make most of the cast, too!
Carruth is a scientist by formation. Therefore, all the part of the story related to the experimentation and discussions taken part in the garage are truly believable as they have all the technical jargon that you expect from real physicists. If time-travel was discovered would be, we can guess, in a similar way to the one portrayed in the movie.
The use of the camera and the amateurish acting (really pedestrian in the case of Carruth) help the story to be credible, down to earth and realistic. As if somebody was filming the meetings and wanderings of the characters with a video-camera. Something very close to reality to what went on in Carruth's house when he was preparing and shooting the movie.
The movie is definitely
original, believable and refreshing, and incredibly good-looking
for the low budget. A good suit and a tie always work on camera! The 1990s mood and style are very good. The mobiles and the computers range between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, and the laptop in the movie is very similar to my first (and now ancient MS2) Toshiba.
The first and main problem of the movie, to me, is not the jargon, but the fact that the dialogues are crowded, words colliding atomically against others at the speed of light. Moreover, the diction of the actors, especially of the two main characters, is really bad, a fact that is highlighted by the poor quality of the sound. Secondly, there are gaps and blurs not well explained in the script, or perhaps are just the result of a poor editing. In general, the movie is a bit thick and confusing.
The movie won the Prize
of the Jury and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance 2004,
but I do not think the first one was deserved - my opinion.
The first time I wrote about this movie, I ended saying:
Carruth is somebody to watch in the future and has brilliant ideas. Hopefully, he will have enough budget next time, and will have learnt better film-making skills, so he can make a great film that is not just for scientists doing a Ph.D. and without having to sacrifice any depth. That's possible. You need to learn film-making, not just produce your own brilliant ideas.
Well, he has proven to
continue to showcase his talent, and wrote the scripts for two other science-fiction movies: the critically well-received "Looper" and for the just released and winner of the Special Prize of the Jury at Sundance 2013, "Upstream Colour".
Eternal Sunshine is a philosophical analysis of the nature of love and relationships. It reflects very well the changing emotions associated with falling in love and the ups and downs of personal relationships, and how unnecessary it is to erase our emotional past to survive. None of this is said or discussed in the movie, as this is a metaphorical film that uses the visual narrative to approach these points.
Eternal Sunshine is one of those movies that many people would see twice to fully catch all the details, because the editing and what happens in the film is complex. There are three different narrative time moments, narrated in non-chronological order, sometimes overlapping each other. It is not a film for simple minded people or those who have to have everything simply explained and presented to them. The film needs of an attentive attention and mental involvement, but the poetry of the images, the oddity of the story will captivate you very soon and you won't even notice that you are making any effort to understand the whole thing.
Jim Carrey surprises everybody with a role that shows the great actor he can be, and how versatile he is, too. He's superb as Joel, a lonely insecure and depressed guy who tends to get involved with women who are his opposite, who faces love, abandonment, rejection, loneliness, and companionship. Also excellent (and outside of their usual roles) is Kate Winslet in her role as Clementine, a cheeky cheerful girl addicted to flashy hair dyes who is attracted to boring men.
The lyricism of the music, the surreal scenes, the poetic cinematography, the part of the movie showing Joel efforts to preserve the memories of the past he initially wanted to destroy, the fact that the special effects are no such a thing but camera tricks and the result of a meticulous preparation and tampering of the movie sets, adds even more artistic value to this unique piece. The director and the editor of the film really deserve a big praise, as the movie is indebted to them beyond belief.
The only flaws I saw in the movie are the little romance mini-stories related to the technicians and doctor of the Lacuna Clinic (which do not contribute much to a film that, otherwise, would have been perfect), and the outcome linked to those actions could have been presented in a different way.
I would not call this movie a comedy, but a light drama.
Eternal Sunshine is a magical, unique and unforgettable movie. A piece of art, really, and of the best movies by Gondry.
