A great film.

Down on his luck everyman, Joel (Jim Carrey), shares a tumultuous love with high-strung Clementine (Kate Winslet). One day, Clementine has no recollection of their life and can’t even recognize him, and it turns out that she’s enlisted the help of a new memory erase procedure allowing her to delete their entire relationship from her mind.

Distraught Joel opts to do the same. But once the procedure begins, delightfully presented by scribe Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry (their previous collaboration was the spotty Human Nature) as a low-tech brainwash, Joel realizes his mistake: he still loves her deeply. Unable to wake himself mid-procedure, he revisits the buried past of their relationship, leading her on a wild hide and seek chase through his memories, attempting to evade the erase process together.

Complicating everything are procedure technicians Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood, the latter of which has stolen Joel’s memories and is using them to romance understandably confused Clementine, and idealistic secretary Kirsten Dunst. Dunst holds a few well-kept secrets of her own (that even she may not know of). Founder Tom Wilkinson runs the show with a poker face and fatherly matter-of-factness.

It almost goes without saying that the visual invention is off the map, and former music video director Gondry employs many strikingly simple visual tricks and forced perspectives to indicate the disintegration of Joel’s memories, as he and Clementine travel through the crumbling chaos. In many scenes, they run through his memories while the set disappears around them.

I’m convinced that celebrated screenwriter Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) somehow missed the part of adolescence where we shut off our imaginations in favor or pragmatism. His elaborate world is a place where anything that can happen—even those things that can’t—actually does happen. He couldn’t write a formula screenplay if he tried, and here he further cements his place as the movies’ most creatively satisfying story artist.

What’s most special about this very funny film is the amount of genuine poignancy managing to sneak up on you between the two star-crossed lovers. Of course, Joel may not be a reliable narrator, idealizing memories of his former love (don’t we all?). Therein lies the Eternal Sunshine’s resonant message—that losing and letting go of formative memories, even painful ones, is a tragedy that chips away at who you are. You lose them, you lose yourself.

Carrey, often stretching in lifeless films like The Majestic, has a subdued intensity, eschewing comic tricks and works largely with lost-in-love, puppy-dog melancholy. As for emotional Winslet, as the self-proclaimed "high-maintenance" heroine, she appears here with more hyper-active energy and endearingly neurotic focus than she’s had since Peter Jackson’s 1994 Heavenly Creatures, creating a character so magnetic that it’s always clear why Joel fights to keep her memory alive. She’s fantastically against type, off kilter and bittersweet.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is funny without a hint of the juvenile, madly romantic without being cliché, moving without being sentimental, transporting without a trace of gimmick.