And, of course, Kate Winslet...
This is the story of a guy, Joel (Jim Carrey),who discovers that his long-time girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet),has undergone a psychiatrist's (Tom Wilkinson)experimental procedure in which all of her memory of Joel is removed, after the couple has tried for years to get their relationship working fluidly. Frustrated by the idea of still being in love with a woman who doesn't remember their time together, Joel agrees to undergo the procedure as well, to erase his memories of Clementine. The film, which takes place mostly within Joel's mind, follows his memories of Clementine backwards in time as each recent memory is replaced, and the procedure then goes on to the previous one, which is likewise seen, and then erased. Once the process starts, however, Joel realizes he doesn't really want to forget Clementine, so he starts smuggling her away into parts of his memory where she doesn't belong which alters other things about his memories as well...
To give you an idea how much press this movie got, the summary above was written by some guy on AOL. It was the best summary on the IMDB.com page for this movie, which is a damn shame.
More to the point, there just wasn't much attention paid to this movie, which I can only attribute to the idea that if the movie studios let Jim Carrey get established as a serious actor, they are afraid they will lose all his future rubberface movies.
This is a problem, because as anyone who watches this movie can attest, Carrey is a fine actor. ESotSM was one of his best performances on film, ever, and also one of the best performances on film last year. I will say that I thought Tim Robbins did better in Mystic River, but then he has years of experience in serious roles, where for Carrey, this makes what, two?
Carrey is not alone in his skill, either. Kate Winslet does a fine job, as does Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Wilkenson. Elijah Wood is often mantioned with regard to this movie, but in fact his part is very small; it would have been difficult in the extreme for him to really mess it up.
This movie, like The Machinist, requires the audience to do a little work; it doesn't hand the story to you on a platter, but expects you to use your brain to keep up. Watching this movie requires you to figure out, on-the-fly, which scenes are Carrey's memories, which are real, and when chronologically everything happens. Unlike The Machinist, ESotSM does a better job of tying everything together: even if you're hopelessly lost throughout, you'll get it in the last few minutes.
IMDB maintains a list of all the filmmaking "errors" in every movie; I spotted one they didn't, but to be fair, I didn't spot any of the ones they did. The one mistake I did see seemed fairly glaring, but minor enough to ignore. (At one point, Kirsten Dunst is supposedly listening to an audio tape; she clicks a key on the tape recorder, and a recorded voice comes on that's ostensibly the contents of the tape, but in fact the tape deck's wheels aren't turning, and neither is the tape. No big deal.)
I bring this up only to point out that although I am unusually hawkeyed for movie errors, this movie really only had a couple; not only was the script and acting good, but the director managed to put this movie together very well in terms of the technical aspects of the filmmaking process, which is becoming more and more unusual as we move more towards the quick buck school of film.
All in all, this is an exceptional movie, and well worth watching; I can only assume that the near-total lack of publicity surrounding its release is a result of Hollywood's condescending assumption that the movie public is so stupid they wouldn't understand, and therefore wouldn't enjoy, ESotSM.
Not only did I not feel like my rental fee was wasted, I will be buying this, and soon. It's fantastic.
