Brilliant mistake

The beginning of "Eternal Sunshine" is nothing short of lovely; in fact, it's close to perfect. We see Carrey's Joel waking up in his plain-vanilla outskirts-of-New York apartment on a shivery winter morning; striding toward his car in the parking lot only to see that the driver's side door has been gouged; waiting on a crowded train platform, headed for his job in the city; and then making a last-minute dash for a train to Montauk, for reasons we won't fully understand till the end of the movie. There he walks along a doleful blue-gray beach. He sees an interesting-looking girl. We hear what he's thinking in a gruff, whispery voiceover that sounds as if it's emerging from the seashell of our own deep subconscious. He asks himself, for example, why he falls in love immediately with anyone who shows him the slightest bit of attention?

On the train back to the city, he gets acquainted with the interesting-looking girl, who is, of course, Clementine. She has blue hair that has further rebelled against authority by sticking out every which way; it will change color several more times during the course of the movie. ("I apply my personality in a paste," she explains to Joel, half apologetically and half defensively.) Their first conversation has a nervous, twitchy energy, animated by their attraction to each other and by their desperate hope that each will find the other amusing and intriguing. (She: "That's the oldest trick in the stalker's book." He: "There's a stalker's book? I've got to read that one.") They speak to each other like people who have just met, after having been lovers for ages.

We want them to be together possibly even more than they do, and Gondry and Kaufman build on that foundation for the rest of "Eternal Sunshine." As the story progresses, we learn that the opening was a flashback of sorts: Joel and Clementine have broken up, bitterly. Joel hopes to win her back by buying her a necklace from her favorite store (in one of the movie's gentlest and most resonating touches, he has chosen a gift that's clearly perfect for her character, a pendant made from a hand-painted shell), but when he shows up at the bookstore where she works, she looks at him as if she doesn't know him. He's crushed, and then angry; before long he finds out that she's had her memories of him erased from her brain, a service offered by a company called Lacuna, which operates out of a city office that looks more briskly efficient than shady.

Joel, in an act of despairing retaliation, decides he wants the procedure done, too. He asks Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Wilkinson), the doctor-slash-guru who invented the technique, if the erasure carries any risk of brain damage. "Technically, the process is brain damage," Mierzwiak responds with a straight face and a dash of doctorly confidence. The process involves, among other things, knocking the patient out with drugs, placing a helmet on his head that looks like a cross between a colander and an old-fashioned bonnet hairdryer, and attaching a laptop to the whole contraption. A team of trained technicians -- that would be Ruffalo's Stan and Elijah Wood's Patrick -- then locate the pertinent memories on an onscreen map of the patient's brain and zap them one by one.

The unconscious Joel unravels his and Clementine's history, starting with the breakup. But as he moves back through the relationship, surveying all the small moments that make up the mosaic of a relationship, he realizes there are parts of Clementine he can't bear to give up. At one point, the two of them are making love underneath a comforter -- the light shines through it faintly, turning their faces funny colors, and we feel we've been drawn deep inside their tent of intimacy. We see Joel running through hallways of memories, and they're gobbled behind him as if by an invisible crocodile. In one sequence, he and Clementine run past a fence, and its planks disappear one by one, like a disappearing zipper made of piano keys.

The first time Joel hits a memory he knows he can't live without, he pleads, "Oh please, let me hang on to just this one!" The technicians, of course, can't hear him, and they're barely paying attention to their jobs anyway: Stan has invited his girlfriend, Mary (Dunst), over to keep him company. Mary is also the receptionist at Lacuna, and while she takes a fleeting interest in Stan's work, the two of them are much more interested in setting the laptop on autopilot, raiding Joel's refrigerator and liquor cabinet, and stripping down to their underwear and jumping up and down on his bed, barely bothering to avoid his passed-out, helmeted, pajama-clad form. Meanwhile, after having a beer or two, Patrick has taken off completely to spend the evening with his new girlfriend.

"Eternal Sunshine" cuts between that exaggerated, jokey subplot and the real drama of the picture: the desperate efforts of Joel and Clementine, even as they're locked in the confines of Joel's brain, to stick together. (At one point, conspiring to foil the brain-erasers, they hide out in Joel's childhood kitchen: He crouches, in feetie-pajamas, beneath an outsize kitchen table; she has adopted the guise of his childhood baby sitter, in mini-dress and lace-up go-go boots.)

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