It's not all springtime and daisies for "Eternal Sunshine"

The mind of Charlie Kaufman is very strange place to be.

Kaufman is trying hard to prove to us in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" what we understood so well from "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation": that he not only thinks outside the box more than almost any other screenwriter, he takes apart the box, puts it back together as a cone, then smashes it anyway. But by making himself and his ideas the focus of "Eternal Sunshine" more so than any of his characters, Kaufman eliminates the human touch that characterizes his previous screenplays and transcend the inaccessibility of his storylines. And without decent characters, his ideas, no matter how creative, have nowhere to go.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" contains a lot of elements that simply exist without purpose or direction. It's wacky for the sake of being wacky. It's shot on shaky cam for the sake of being shaky (and boy, is that a mistake). It's non-chronological because Kaufman didn't get the memo that "Memento" and Quentin Tarantino did that already, and did it better. The movie lacks the speed and sharpness of a comedy and the suspense and motivation of a drama. It just happens, and, because it's inexplicable for the sake of being"what else"inexplicable, you're left to wonder why.

Each person in "Eternal Sunshine" is relegated one emotion to stick with throughout the film. This, of course, ensures that no pesky character development or uppity actor gets in the way of our appreciation Kaufman's oddball vision"let's not forget whom this movie is about. The actors work well with what they have, but without evolution, their portrayals devolve into redundancy. Jim Carrey is properly pathetic as the pathetic Joel Barish, a reticent, unfocusedly slovenly character desolated over a break-up with his girlfriend, the eccentric Clementine Kruczynski, portrayed by Kate Winslet with all the proper eccentricity due to her character's name.

Joel tries to win Clementine back, but finds that her memory of him has been erased by solemn visionary Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson, properly solemn) with the help of his earnest secretary Mary (Kirsten Dunst, properly earnest) and his bumbling assistants Stan and Patrick (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood, properly…you get the idea). In retaliation, Joel decides to have his memories of Clementine erased.

The meat of the movie takes place during the memory-erasing procedure, which occurs at Joel's home while he sleeps and requires him to relive (backwards, for the sake of backwardness) every single Clementine memory. This soon becomes numbingly repetitive. The bad memories are much the same: Joel is embarrassed by Clementine's audacity and Clementine is angered at Joel's passive-aggressive criticism. Kaufman shows us nothing new in Joel's brain for several eons, and it seems as though Joel's mind is as boring as his outside persona.

The turmoil of Joel's personal life also begins to affect the outer world in a clever subplot. Patrick sneakily steals the mementos of Clementine Joel gave to Mierzwiak to destroy and uses them to seduce Clementine for himself, adopting Joel's words, letters, and even Valentine's Day gifts. Watching Patrick clumsily spew Joel's love lines and try to dupe Clementine is amusing, but also chilling, especially when Joel tries to regain control of his brain and stop the procedure.

Though this subplot is engaging, it intertwines little with the action going on in Joel's mind and exposes two focal problems of "Eternal Sunshine":predictability of plot and aggravating cinematography.

Almost from the first five minutes, when Joel looks at his diary and ponders, "I don't remember tearing those pages out," the ending is a given. Even the final twist comes less as a surprise than as an inevitability. Kaufman's message (besides the touting of his own genius) is that, even knowing the consequences, humans will commit the same mistakes in their relationships with almost masochistic persistence"this theme is reinforced in the relationships between the doctors doing Joel's "operation." And while the idea is enough to build a movie on, it lends itself to a fatalism that destroys the sense of anticipation so crucial and gripping in "Adaptation" and that would be so useful in "Eternal Sunshine."

In a futile attempt to inject a few surprises into "Eternal Sunshine" director Michel Gondry prevents us from seeing Patrick's face after his first, mystifying appearance. Since Patrick is shown in the beginning and Wood's voice is pretty recognizable, it's not hard to put two and two together and get that it's Patrick, not a random stranger, making out with Clementine behind that bookcase. This is one of many annoying camera techniques employed throughout the movie.

Gondry needs to get together with Sofia Coppola ("Lost in Translation")and discuss the miraculous invention that enables you to hold a camera steady known as the tripod. The unsteady quality of the scenes becomes positively nauseating and accomplishes nothing for what could have been an artistically shot film. While transitions between scenes are inventive, often involving the melding of sound from inside and outside Joel's world, it's difficult to be appreciative when you're constantly dizzy.

Once Joel decides to take Clementine and hide her away in "unmapped" parts of his brain inaccessible to the doctors, the film picks up. The jokes fly faster when Clementine becomes a sixties babysitter to a four-year-old Joel (still in the body of 40-something Jim Carrey), and for a few, brief moments, "Eternal Sunshine" shows flashes of art in its design. But Kaufman's ingenuity stops at the introduction of this plot device"his characters are still unlikable, their actions, predictable.

Though conceptually as bizarre as "Being John Malkovich" and other Kaufman fare, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is way below par for an author who has proven his ability to not only conceive of an original idea, but develop it as well.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is rated R for language, some drug use and sexual content.