Sunshine almost sparkles

Film may have achieved greater verisimilitude over the years, rejecting the slapredon solution to creating Native Americans, or waves crashing on beaches as a metaphor for sex, but there's one key taboo that directors and producers can't bear to address: the star playing a role far too young for him or her. It's almost an axiom of Hollywood stardom in particular: the bigger you are, the younger you may be.

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey ascends to this mutton empyrean, as at fortysomething he reins in his urge to gurn, in order to play Joel Barish, a thirtysomething slacker whose kooky ex-girlfriend (thirtysomething Kate Winslet, playing twentysomething Clementine Kruczynski) decides to have all memory of their troubled relationship erased from her mind.

Clementine goes to Lacuna, a peculiar little company run by Dr Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson, looking as baffled as he did in In the Bedroom), where a hokey assemblage of a laptop computer, a dentist's chair and a salon hairdryer are employed by technicians Patrick and Stan ( Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo) to suck out all traces of Joel from her - undoubtedly pretty - head.

Complications ensue when Joel, reeling from the indifference of Clementine's spotless mind, decides to have Lacuna erase all memories of her from his own apparently empty brain. The Lacuna set-up is nicely handled: with the trademark legerdemain of true absurdism, no prosaic realities are allowed to undermine its arrant preposterousness. Like Joseph K's metamorphosis into a cockroach, we are asked to accept it, tout â¡ fait.

This is the basic schema, but Eternal Sunshine being about memory, it jumps about the place like a grasshopper on speed. We begin at the end, then work backwards and forwards simultaneously until events are resolved inside Joel's head, where treasured recollections do battle with their pillagers in a bizarre duel that sees people schlupping out of existence as they're vacuumed into oblivion. But frankly, any film that has a 20-minute pre-credit sequence, as this does, needs to have more than tricksiness up its sleeve.

Scripted by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), I had high hopes for Eternal Sunshine. It's a treat to see a film that is actually being marketed on the strengths of its writer. In fact, in the modern era, it's almost as implausible as going to see an exhibition of sculpture where the pieces have been made by the sculptor himself, rather than a team of hired fabricators.

But for all its high-falutin' references - the title is a quote from Alexander Pope, Nietschze is bandied about, and there's even a visual nod to the Russian directorial genius Tarkovsky - this is just another rom com with a bit of angst and ontological confusion thrown into the mix.

The problems lie in the conceit as it relates to the characters - and by extension with the actors as well. We're meant to believe in the transcendence of Joel and Clementine's love, as it conquers their self-willed destruction of their relationship, but who are they? Joel is an ageing, cartoon-doodling, woolly-hat-sportingtimorous bore, while Clementineis a hair-dyeing, ginminiaturescarfing, car-crashing, potatodollmaking superannuated wild child. We never get beyond these stereotypes, although Kaufman gives us rich material for a more evolved psychology.

THE crux of the film comes when Clementine tells Joel that she wants to have a baby, and he reacts with hysterical negativity. If Kaufman could have held that insight and plugged it back into his story - which is really all about the soullessness of serial monogamy in a culture steeped in commitment phobia and the entropy of a declining birthrate - he might have created something truly memorable.

There are scenes here where the queasy sensation that we've all experienced, of sharing a bed with our lover's former lovers, are brought to troubling life. Kirsten Dunst plays Mary, a fey employee of Lacuna, who pitches up to get loaded with Frank (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Patrick as they suck Clementine out of Joel. High and drunk, Frank and Mary have sex, then, stripped to their underwear, dance on top of Joel's bed as he lies prone in his hair-dryer. It's as nice an evocation as I've ever seen of how in a world where people acquire and discard relationships the same way they upgrade their computer equipment, we all become the passive victims of others' stoned abandonment.