Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Every once in a while, Jim Carrey feels the need to play it straight in an effort to convince us that he's not always a gurning idiot. That's about the only predictable thing about this perplexing but intoxicating romantic drama, which swirls around the mind for days afterwards. Scripted by Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), it follows Joel Barish, an emotionally brittle man who awakens one morning and feels a mysterious draw to a beach in Montauk, Long Island. It's there that he encounters the extremely wilful Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), whom he gets talking to on the way home. The pair feel drawn to each for reasons that are too strange to explain.

Bemusing but enthralling, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an involving treatise on the nature of love, but it is also deeply concerned with the concept of memory. An intensely ambitious piece of work, the only criticism that could be levelled at Eternal Sunshine is that perhaps it chases down too many ideas at once, but it's refreshing to see a director and a writer so in synch and so willing to take this many chances. And it's even more refreshing to see the emotional dividends being paid as readily as they are here. Naturally, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind won't pack them in the numbers that we usually associate with Carrey movies, but pictures this fragile, beautiful and mystifying aren't a regular occurrence. Quite gorgeous.