Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind celebrates a notion that all romantics surely hold true: that no mistake is not worth making. From this point of view springs the belief that misery is worth remembering. In this film, Joel Barrish and Clementine Kruczynski go from being madly in love to abhorring each other, and people who let common sense take precedence in every aspect of their lives may not realize that for many people, love makes mistakes and the misery that ensues completely worthwhile.

In the film, Joel (Jim Carrey) is a quiet, lonely man who if he were more assuming might write poetry in the journal he always carries (he draws instead). He falls in love with Clementine (Kate Winslet) and is out of it again before the opening credits hit. The chronology of these emotional highs and lows is not quite certain: they're in his car together one moment, having spent the night together on the frozen Charleston river, and the next Joel is alone, sobbing behind the wheel.

Through what seems like haphazard narrative trial and error, we eventually come to understand that Clementine, at some point in her relationship with Joel, underwent a process to have her memories of him removed from her mind, and that Joel himself is now having the same procedure performed on him, and that everything we've seen and are seeing may in fact be a memory, subject to deletion. The operation is performed at the patient's home, so that they can wake up in the morning with no memory of whatever they don't remember.

Director Michel Gondry, working in tandem with Charlie Kaufman, have constructed the film much the same way memories work. The company that performs the deletion, Lacuna Inc, maps out emotional territory by showing the patients particular items and then tracing the neurons that are stimulated by the visual association; likewise, the movie bounces, almost free-associatively, from one memory to the next, and halfway through the process Joel's subconscious id realizes how much the memories of Clementine matter to him and he begins to try to hide them. Things begin to merge; in one triumphant scene, a childhood memory of a rainstorm showers down on him and Clementine as they cuddle on the couch; moments later, she's become his babysitter and he's a four year old hiding under the table.

The success of the film falls largely on the shoulders of its three leading men (no offense to Winslet, whose Clementine is an angel whose fluctuations are enchanting, or Kirsten Dunst, who plays one of the brainwashers). There is Carrey, of course, who tones his performance down past the point of being toned down; so many actors have trouble talking as if they don't want to be talking, but he nails it. He is not manic or zany in this movie in the slightest; he's just genuinely sad, sad for those memories in which he's genuinely happy.

Then there is Gondry, a true visual genius whose narrative abilities weren't 100% on display in his first collaboration with Kaufman, Human Nature, takes a rough, handheld approach to the film. When odd things happen, when the titles of books begin to disappear or faces lose their features, there is no expectation for it on our part because there is no obvious mise-en-scene, no pointers. He esches digital effects for simple practical tricks, sleight of hand; he's professed extreme admiration for George Melies, the magician who applied his trade to silent films, and the special effects in this film go back to the beginning of cinema. You ask someone how they did an effect in a scene these days, they'll tell you it was CGI; they won't be able to say that about this one, for the most part, and they also won't be able to explain how Gondry did it.

And finally we come to Kaufman, who wrote the script. His past films, all of which I've enjoyed, some more than others, were all cursed with a third act that did not bear up under the weight of his imagination (he acknowledged the problem in Adaptation, but did not solve it). Perhaps because it works backwards, because it starts out in pieces and slowly comes together, this film is his first true masterpiece, with a story and characters than the outmuscles the conceit of his insane brand of creativity. It's worth mentioning that not only does he tell Joel's story, but that of the employees at Lacuna -- Tom Wilinson, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Dunst -- who are all taking their work home with them, in their own separate ways.

The film begins and ends on two different Valetines Days, and there is a joke about it being the busiest time of year at Lacuna. Some people might indeed be happier living with a constantly clean slate, but some people prefer not to grow. For others, bad memories receed, good ones get better, and the unbearable turns bitterseet; I know that if I could fall in love the way I fell in love for the first time again, I may have to decline, but I wouldn't trade the experience for the world. Everyone involved in this film clearly shares that sentiment.