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Complicated Movie, Too Simple Message Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an intriguing title, kind of surreal and postmodernist. The film's premise is also intriguing: you can have painful memories of a bad relationship erased; but once you make that choice, you may not want to go through with it. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who has given us Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Eternal Sunshine. Stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are wonderful, as are all the supporting cast, which includes Kirsten Dunst (at last breaking out of her Mary Jane role!). Carrey plays Joel, an introverted man in love with impulsive blue/green/red-haired Clementine, played by Kate Winslet. I have to say, her American accent is scarily perfect (Are we that easily imitated? I will have to work on my British accent). Joel and Clem are very different people, and their differences soon begin to rub the relationship raw. Clementine decides to have her memories erased at a company called Lacuna. From this point on, the film becomes more confusing, convoluted, and complicated than intriguing. The film's basic message is as Carrey put it in the extras: you can't help but love who you love. You can make it work despite your differences. It may sound profound, but it is not. Joel is dreary and boring, Clementine is shallow and silly. To put viewers through all this to arrive at this message makes trying to understand the movie more work than entertainment. After I watched the film with my husband, I was so frustrated as to why the film had two completely different beginnings, and why the end was so confusing, that I watched the entire film again with commentary. I just wanted to relax for a couple of hours, but this ended up like a study session, work, not fun. In the extras, even Jim Carrey says he and Winslet had to "constantly ask in what time frame" they were doing a scene. Kaufman comments that many people told him the film was "too complicated," but he basically shrugs and brushes them off. The French director casually mentions that viewers will "get it the second . . . third . . . or fourth time they see it." Hey, I don't know about you, but I don't like to pay to have my intelligence insulted. Another thing that was unrealistic is that Clementine had outrageous, brightly-colored hair, but tasteful, demure, professionally applied makeup. To look at a different movie with a secret, many saw the Sixth Sense and didn't "get it." But that movie's twist was truly original, and big. Eternal Sunshine is just about two people who are attracted to each other, but who lack relationship skills. If Joel and Clem were your downstairs neighbors, you would be like "oh, God, THAT COUPLE is fighting again!!!" To look at Clementine, she wasn't a very likeable character. Several times in the film she boozes it up, and crows "Yay, ALCOHOL!" I have a friend who is an alcoholic, and I don't think Clementine's borderline alcoholism is funny or endearing. Clementine is also impulsive and reckless, even dragging Joel onto a frozen lake. That is dangerous. Clementine is cute, but she only lives for the moment. How many friends or relatives do you have who are in a bad relationship, and whine to you over the phone about it until you want to scream? How many bad relationships have you been in? Are you in one now? There is nothing profound about the basic message of this film if you are looking at these two characters, Joel and Clementine.