The problem is that the movie stretches too hard to come up with wacky twists and turns, when what's really riveting is the way Joel and Clementine strive to stay connected to one another. The narrative machinations strain at cleverness, but they can't live up to the movie's visual inventiveness, which is so casual and offhanded that it renders this weird fantasy world wholly believable. Gondry built his early career directing commercials and music videos. His work with Björk, in particular, in videos like "Bachelorette," "Human Behaviour" and "Isobel," have an unearthly, quivering quality reminiscent of the early days of filmmaking, the kind of thing Georges Méliès might have done if he were working today. Gondry gave us miniature airplanes sprouting inside light bulbs (before busting out to scatter through the air like insects) and books that start out normal-sized and grow to gigantic proportions.

In "Eternal Sunshine," Gondry's vision is rarely overtly fanciful; he's much more interested in the magic of straightforwardness. (His cinematographer here is Ellen Kuras, and she gives the movie a look of dreamy urgency that's perfect for the story.) The visual effects in "Eternal Sunshine" are stunningly simple: Gondry plays with scale in the kitchen scene, using giant furniture to make Joel seem fragile and tiny. (Gondry has used similar effects in his music videos, and they're also evocative of the effective visual gags Spike Jonze concocted for "Being John Malkovich.") And I have never before seen an everyday quilt lit up with the fragile glow of a Chinese paper lantern. It's the kind of image you drink in and savor, and it's also a metaphor for the connection and warmth that Joel and Clementine have lost. "Eternal Sunshine" is most elegiac when there are no words in sight.

And yet it's to Kaufman's credit that the dialogue between Joel and Clementine always rings true. If you can comb past the craziness around them and just listen to them, you hear that they speak to each other just as people in love (or falling out of it) do. Carrey and Winslet are wonderful here. Clementine is different from any character Winslet has ever played. The actress typically radiates angelic calmness; here, she's always vibrating, an electrified rabbit that can't be turned off. Yet it's impossible not to care for her: Her dippiness isn't an affectation, but a light beam that shines in a wriggly line straight from her soul. She's flaky and feisty in equal measures, a mix of qualities that makes her fragility that much more believable.

Carrey is Winslet's perfect counterpart. Although much of what he does here is funny in a sidelong way, this is a deeply serious, and wondrous, performance. When we finally get around to seeing Joel and Clementine's first meeting, she asks him if she can have a piece of chicken off his plate, and then grabs it before he can say yes. "It was like we were already lovers," Joel reflects, not dreamily but as if he were stating an indisputable fact on which the fate of the nations of the world depended. Winslet is the one with the large, searching eyes, but in my memory of Carrey's performance, his are much larger: They're striving to take everything in, to record events and places but, chiefly, to memorize Clementine's face. It's a face that means the world to him, and it's in danger of disappearing forever. Carrey's Joel is an ordinary guy -- there's something inexplicably touching about his regular-joe shirt-and-sweater outfits -- but his romantic desperation is like something out of a 19th century novel or a '20s silent film. It's large and magnificent, a force that can't help busting out of the framework of everyday life.

Meanwhile, Dunst's Mary and Ruffalo's Stan jump up and down in their underwear, Wood's Patrick bumbles through his newfound romance, and Dr. Mierzwiak's jealous wife shows up unannounced. We're supposed to laugh, or feel nervous apprehension, or wonder what kind of crazy thing is going to happen next -- but all we want to do is get back to Joel and Clementine. Those loopy shenanigans constitute the movie's connective tissue, but it feels stretched out and feeble. What's real and what's not? Kaufman and Gondry seem to be asking again and again, without realizing that the very faces of their two lead actors have completely erased our interest in those types of questions. The filmmakers busy themselves puttering around the boundaries between fantasy and illusion, without realizing that they're the only ones who care: Once we're inside Joel's head, that is our reality.

I've been critical of Kaufman in the past, chiefly because I despised the phoniness of "Adaptation." But if I hold Kaufman responsible for much of what troubles me about "Eternal Sunshine," I have to allow that much of what's right about it must also stem directly from him: The movie is redolent with wistfulness and melancholy, and those aren't things you can layer on after the fact.

The disappointment I felt at the end of "Eternal Sunshine" was almost crushing, simply because there were sections of it that were as daring in their emotional directness as anything I've seen in years. Did Kaufman, or Kaufman and Gondry, construct the movie as they did simply so audiences wouldn't leave the theater feeling too devastated to engage in conversation, let alone a cocktail or a cappuccino? Maybe. Yet there are moments in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" that bring us as close as anyone should ever come to staring at the sun. The movie's warmth is irresistible; the risk of getting burned should have been left to us.

Recent Stories