Netflix Mini Review (NMR): Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Thanks to my brother, I got a Netflix subscription for Christmas. My queue is all loaded up and I'll be watching a lot of movies over the next few months that for one reason or another slipped through the cracks when they first came out. These will be shorter reviews than I typically do for first run movies because if they were as long as those, I'd never get any work done. So without further ado is the first review for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I had a real difficult time getting into this one. Partially because I was tired and partially because the narrative is really hard to follow. Now I'm not some dim-bulb who finds Back to the Future complex, so for me to say the movie was hard to follow, you know that this is one involved movie. However, I'm glad I stuck with it, because once you really grasp what's going on, it is a fun ride. Seeing Jim Carrey at war with his own mind is fun and really unique. For most of the film, I had no clue how this was going to get resolved. The film is also filled with a great supporting cast including Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, and Mark Ruffalo (who I usually don't care for). I must say, though, that I thought the best performance came from Kate Winslet. I haven't seen too much else from her to compare this to her other films, but I thought she was superb in this. I found her completely engaging and understood why Jim Carrey's character would be attracted to her, yet also find having a relationship with her difficult.

I will say that I was slightly disappointed in the ending though. Not so much for the events that took place, but for what I ulimately got out of the film. For as creative as this film is, it ends up being another film about a couple who needs to communicate better to realize they belong together. They are not breaking any grounds with that idea. I would have liked if they had more to say about the power of the mind or perhaps even about fate. These ideas certainly are touched upon in the film, but aren't fully realized. Maybe with successive viewings I could find those ideas to be stronger, but for now I found them to be lacking. Whether I'm looking for deeper meaning or not, I think this one deserves repeated viewing just so I can go back and understand better what was going on throughout the movie. Unfortunately, because I want to maximize the number of movies I see through Netflix, a repeat viewing of this will have to wait for another day. Netflix rating: ****