The thing about Charlie Kaufmann screenplays is that they are never about the bizarre inventions and oddities that drive his stories, but the ideas and concepts that the inventions suggest. Being John Malkovich doesn't spend a frame of film trying to explain exactly how the portal to Malkovich's brain works. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind takes its central premise - Chuck Barris is a t.v. producer and CIA assassin - as fact, and runs with it. What make his stories compelling is not so much these oddities but rather how they imply and illuminate emotions, ideas and thoughts.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman's latest nonchalant monkey-wrenching of reality, is no different than his previous work. He conceives of a medical procedure that can erase entire sequences of memory; this would be useful for forgetting, say, a painful relationship. No one questions how the procedure works, nor do they worry (much) about side effects ("Will this cause brain damage?" "Well, technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage"). It was invented by Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (played wonderfully by Tom Wilkinson), who runs a company appropriately named Lacuna Inc. ("lacuna" means "an empty space or missing part").

The movie is a nice little puzzle to unfold, and the audience should be left to its own devices. But the major plot develops as follows: Clementine (Kate Winslet) has the procedure performed on her in order to forget that she ever fell in love with Joel. Joel (Jim Carey) discovers this fact after he confronts her after their break up and she seems not only to not remember who he is, but has a new boyfriend. In revenge, he decides to have erased his memories of her .

The inevitable hitch in the process happens when Joel decides to have the procedure halted. Of course, he is basically asleep, and has no way of communicating his wishes to the Lacuna technicians (a merry band of jackasses led by a nerdy Mark Ruffalo, who goes about his work like he is performing an x-ray). In a last ditch attempt, he tries to "hide" his memories of Clementine in the darker corners of his mind.

Much of the running time is the battle for memories. The film moves unhindered through time, with Joel reliving memories, good and bad, of Clementine, intercut with Lacuna technicians clashing with Joel's sudden mental reluctance, intercut further with Clementine suffering with her own sense of unease. We are never sure if we are watching actual memories, actual sequences, memories of memories, manifestations of several memories intertwined, or something altogether new. Director Michel Gondry (who directed Human Nature , a Kaufmann movie that was a spectacular failure as an experiment and at the box office) puts together these elements to great anxious effect, conceptualizing Joel's erasing memory as a disintegrating reality. If this sounds bizarre and a little dizzy, it's because it is - Kaufmann and Gondry dive ! headlong into this sticky mess of a plot, exploring relationships and the nature of memory.

But however unwieldy the plot sounds, Eternal Sunshine works because of the centre of the film made up of Joel and Clementine's relationship. Carey plays Joel with uncharacteristic restraint, the kind of person who stays quiet and interacts little because emotions hit him hard. Winslet plays Clementine as a free-spirit, impulsive, self-indulgent, and insufferably needy without providing support herself. Both are annoyed with the other's idiosyncrasies, but nevertheless in love with each other. Both have a desperate need for companionship and acceptance and both temper it with their unwillingness to make the relationship work for the other person. Carey and Winslet play this coupling well; the audience cares what happens and empathises as their relationship crumbles around them.

And here is the final element of any Kaufmann story; its lesson. Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind is a statement for entering any loving relationship, a bittersweet ode to all fractured bonds and the ensuing loneliness. This is Kaufman's argument for the sum of a relationship being much larger than its individual parts; it's his Tennysonian "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

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