Starring: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Tom Wilkinson (I)

9 ouf of 10 stars

There are films that I love that I know I can't suggest to other people, Punch-Drunk Love, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, for example, and now, I get to add another to the pile, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's films always seem to walk the rail, balancing on his main theme, trying not to slip off onto the inside of the tracks, inventive but precious, or onto the outside of the tracks, inventive but forgettable. With only a few slips into either territory The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind manages, ultimately, to walk the line.

With Human Nature, the first collaboration between Kaufman and director Michel Gondry (this is their second) it was obvious quite quickly that something was wrong with someone's inner ear. Unable to stay on the rail it quickly just shuffled its feet on down the center of the train tracks, eventually hopping off and heading down the bank, never to be seen again.

Being John Malkovich, directed by someone with a better sense of the horizon, Spike Jonze, seemed to not care, ultimately, about staying on track, and wandered on the outside, kicking rocks and having a grand old time.

Adaptation stayed the course. It became almost a freak feat, maintaining it footing all the way down the line. But it did it. And it remains a marvel for doing so.

Eternal slips, a lot, into the inside of the track, but, for the large part, keeps a toe-to-toe momentum that carries it through to the end. It falls, in the second act, into a realm of weirdness that's not only precious, it's embarrassing, but it's largely redeemed by a subdued Jim Carrey and a fidelity to its original supposition: falling in love is crazy.

Eternal is told in a great, circular fashion, with a fractured narrative which manages (and this is quite a trick) to be much more confusing than Memento, Adaptation or 21 Grams ever thought of being. The plot though is essentially this: Joel Barish (Carrey) discovers that the tumultuous, ultimately stultifying relationship with his girlfriend, Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), has been entirely wiped from her memory. She has no idea who he is and their mutual friends have been asked not to discuss Joel, or even bring up his name.

Barish discovers that she was able to do this by going to the Lacuna Corporation, run by Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his slipshod crew, receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst), technician Stan (Mark Rufalo), and Patrick (Elijah Wood), a new guy.

Joel decides to erase his memory too, but discovers, as his memories of Clementine are being singled out for erasure, that he doesn't want to forget her, or their painful love affair, and he tries to find recesses in his brain where it would be safe to entrust the last bits of their past together.

Where this all ends up is satisfying and has resonance for anyone who has had a crazy relationship which they rue…and fondly remember. Eternal has odd parallels in theme with the Kids in the Hall feature, Brain Candy, wherein a happy pill dispelled all negative thought, and what kind of world does that make? Here memories are shown to both make and undo us, defining who we are and maybe fatalistically dooming us to our future.

Director Michelle Gondry has great fun with realistic fantasy visuals; cars fall from the sky, there's a back of a man's head that can never be turned around. He, and cinematographer Ellen Kuras, give the memory world a closeted hand-held space that seems fitting. Open spaces barely exist in Joel's recollection, which fits in with his character and his relationship with Clementine. The one long sequence where the movie jumps the track is where Joel attempts to hide his memories of Clementine in his early childhood. Carrey appears as "baby Joel," underneath the table legs in his mother's kitchen and we see him getting bathed in the sink. Watching Winslet run around calling after Carrey as "Baby Joel, Baby Joel" is just creepy. It must have felt pretty damn weird filming it too.

Then there's the matter of the Lacuna corporation, which may as well be on the same seven-1/2 floor as that portal into John Malkovich's brain. Their portrayal of the firm is one of the failings of the film. Lacuna is so poorly run and seemingly unsuccessful (old `70s office furniture) that the necessary illusion, that Clementine has had her memory erased, is never really accepted.

Carrey, though he never does come off believably as a nebbish, is interesting when he's heart-broken and Winslet gives the right tone to the erratic Clementine, but she has to play so many versions of that character in Joel's memory (waif, whore, harridan) that we're never sure that she embodies her.

I'm still partial to the pairing Kaufman and Jones (who have an untitled project in the works), who seem more in tune with each other's motifs, and it's hard to say whether Kaufman and Gondry needed to take their balancing act up on the high wire or ground it more, but they do interesting work together. Eternal may not earn our devotion but, like Clementine, against all odds it earns our love.