Over the weekend I saw this movie with my friend Bev. She wandered off halfway, and her husband and kids joined in for part of it... basically I couldn't pay full attention to the movie and missed some of the dialogue, which is a shame, because it had a twisty plot. It was up there with Memento and Miller's Crossing as far as complicated stories. I may need to rent and watch it again!
The movie begins with Joel (Jim Carrey) waking up in a daze, finding his car door dented, and standing in a crowd at a train station. He becomes bored and decides to skip work and travel out to Montauk on Long Island. Once there, he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet), they hit it off, and begin to date. We see a few flashbacks and arguments, and on Valentine's Day he takes her a gift, and she doesn't even recognize who he is.
At this point, the movie enters the memory erasure plot. He stumbles on a clinic which offers to erase the memories of a bad relationship, so he signs up to do it. (As a side note, there is a website for Lacuna, the clinic which performs the memory erasing procedure in the movie).
During the procedure, he realizes he really loves Clementine and decides to keep her memory alive. Before, when he agreed to undergo the memory loss, he had to bring in all the tokens of their relationship - cards, pictures, etc. These items were used to form a map in his brain of areas that were active when he thought of her. Knowing this, he realizes that in order to keep her memory alive he has to will her into existence in previously unrelated areas - through concentration she comes into being as a childhood friend, a family friend, an observer at other events, and so forth.
The scenes are fantastic - he relives an early memory of their relationship, and as the memory is discovered and erased, the house they are walking in crumbles and disappears. Near the end of the movie, they are in a bookstore, and as the memory is erased, the books lose their dust jackets, eventually becoming all white with blank pages.
During the erasure, Clementine is aware that it is happening and becomes willing to help keep her memory alive. So they jump from memory to memory, redo certain events in their past and have a "live" discussion of the good times and bad times.
While Joel undergoes the memory erasure, a real world subplot is revealed - the receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst) had an affair with the doctor, and he had erased this memory from her. Mary winds up quitting the clinic, and out of spite, takes all the patient records and mails them out!
Clementine receives her file, along with a tape recording of why she wanted to erase the memory of Joel, and they listen to it in the car together. He gets mad and drives off, and she comes to plead with him, only to find out he is at home listening to his tape of why he wants to erase her. They part angrily, but later during the memory erasure realize they love each other, despite a few flaws. So, she tells him to come meet her Montauk before she disappears for good.
This ties in with the start of the movie, explaining why he gets this sudden urge to skip work and take the train to Montauk.
As I mentioned, the timeline is fluid. The movie was told partly through flashbacks, which weren't always obviously separate from current events. Plus, a large chunk of the movie was essentially his memories of events, seen from a lucid dream viewpoint where he could change how things played out.
I found two things really interesting: 1) how memories are related - and especially how remembering one thing sparks a recollection of another unrelated event, and 2) unconscious behavior - among many examples: Joel decides to go to Montauk for reasons he can't remember, and Clementine wants to spontaneously visit Boston and the Charles River.
The only thing I'm not sure of is the unexplained psychic connection between Joel's memory of Clementine and the real Clementine, as the agreement to work together to keep her memory alive and ultimately meet in Montauk, was all in the dream/memory sequences. Other than that, I think I managed to follow the whole plot even with various distractions. I'll probably queue it up in Netflix just to double check. :)
Overall I really liked this movie. It is a mind-bender but is also one of the more intelligent movies I've seen a quite a while.
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