Strange Love

CHARLIE KAUFMAN'S ETERNAL SUNSHINE

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Charlie Kaufman may be the most distinctive brandname screenwriter since ... well, Joe Eszterhas is the first name that comes to mind, but I meant distinctive in a good way. At this point in Kaufman's career, with five films under his belt—most famously, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation—he may possess the most distinctive voice in movies, period, every bit the auteur that writer-directors Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson are, to drop two names in Kaufman's generational cohort. His latest film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, isn't his oddest or funniest, but that's hardly a knock; it deserves credit as the closest anyone has come to writing a science-fiction comedy-weepie—and I mean that in a good way, too. Audiences will be best served knowing as little as possible going in. (Even the stupid poster gives too much away.) Suffice it to say Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet star in a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back story that's been turned inside out, literally—a romance in the same way that Being John Malkovich was a biopic. Some of the new movie's metaphysical and structural shenanigans feel familiar—

I guess critics can now speak of "the reliably Kaufmanesque"—but the second half of the film finds real pathos while fooling around with questions of loss, memory, and identity, a possibly unprecedented fusion of the moving and the ludicrous. The director is Michel Gondry, who previously collaborated with Kaufman on the overlooked Human Nature, which, if you missed it, includes the funniest aversion-therapy scene in movie history. (Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½)

BRUCE HANDY