How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!
        The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
        Eternal sun-shine of the spotless mind!
        Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;
                        Alexander Pope 1716

Jim Carrey sleeps through this movie. But we don’t. You’ll hear not much laughter in the theater. Don’t come expecting a Jim Carrey comedy. In this film the funniest man in the world is quite the boring fellow. But when I say it’s not a comedy, I mean it’s not a belly-laugh comedy. But the script is jam-packed with wit, conceits and outrageous notions like the Pope poem from which the Sunshine line is taken.

The film pops on with no titles to a close-up of Jim’s face asleep … waking … and getting up in misery, kicking the blankets to the floor. Anyone who has taken psychotropic drugs or drop-dead sleeping pills knows the feeling. It’s like a hangover, yes, but a little different.

Off to work. At his car he finds a sizeable dent on his driver’s side door, exacerbating his bad brains.

Waiting with the chilly commuters, he impulsively decides to take the day off and races to another platform and takes the train to Montauk squeezing into a closing train door with a Jim-Carrey struggle.

The beach at Montauk is raw and windy. Sitting with his sketchbook he notices he hasn’t made an entry in two years (first clue). Later walking on the frosty beach he sees a strange young woman, and later they wind-up on the same train back. No shrinking violet, she approaches him and leaning over the seat in front of him starts shooting the breeze. And yes, she has blue hair. He’s wearing a dorky headhugger, and the chatter soon turns into a taunting-bee by Miss Blue Hair at the shy, depressed sketchbook guy.

Back in the city he offers her a lift, and she hops in post haste and invites him up to her apartment. Drinks? Nay, says he. “Oh come on,” she says, carrying two glasses to the sofa. “It’ll make the seduction so much less repugnant.”

Next morning after exchanging phone numbers, and he’s about to drive off, a little guy, looking strangely like a hobbit (Elijah Wood) knocks on his window and as he’s rolling it down is asked, “What are you doing here?” He frowns and answers, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and drives off (?).

A whole movie review could occupy the space above. But it’s only here that the opening titles appear. Your reviewer long since had forgotten titles!

Thus begins the story of Joel (Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet).

Or is it the beginning? We won’t really know ‘till we get to the end and start watching it again to see what we saw. Yes, it’s another mind-bending screenplay by the one and the only Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation”). This time the kooky subject is memory erasing.

One day Joel stops into Barnes & Noble where Clementine works to say hi. And she treats him like a total stranger. After he realizes she’s not just joking around, he turns and walks away totally mortified, and the bookstore fades to black, but he doesn’t as he enters his sister’s living room where he talks with her and her dickhead husband about this confounding experience. After a few minutes of dickering between the three, the husband hands him an envelope from “Lacuna Inc.” A check-sized slip inside informs him that Clementine was very unhappy in their relationship and has had her mind erased of any memory of him, and further he should not try to see her again.

In his gloomy apartment he broods through the evening and finally takes a pill.

Next we see Joel burst into Lacuna’s busy, bustling waiting room. Mary (Kristen Dunst, who gets cuter by the minute) is the receptionist and tells him he must take a seat and fill-out a clipboard of info while he waits his turn. Sitting next to him is a sad lady with a dog bowl on her lap with “Buster” printed on it and a rawhide bone inside.

Suddenly he’s inside the doc’s office. Howard (Tom Wilkerson) is the big Lacuna here. Joel looks across the room and sees himself in a chair with what looks like a huge metal helmet on his head. Joel realizes immediately that he’s been here before and he too is having his memory erased, and flips out.

Joel in his apartment is out cold on the floor (remember the pill?) and in comes two Lacuna techies with their memory erasing hardware: a laptop computer and the big head piece. They must work all night on this troubled subject; a man whose memory is half-erased and half not. And for most of the time from here on in we’re in Joel’s head watching a crazy salad of scenes in the romance of Joel and Clementine: having fun hiking in the woods, or slipping and sliding on the frozen lake. But in another scene they’re fighting like cats and dogs in their car, which crashes, and what happens then … well, you just have to be there. But what is happening, by fits and starts, Joel is beginning to realize he still loves his goofball girlfriend. Then there’s the Chinese restaurant scene. The pair are eating morosely. Joel is looking around at the other unhappy couples eating their chop-chop and calls them the “dining dead.” Did we tell you Clementine keeps changing her hair color? Always pastels, of course; she calls one “Agent Orange.”

Despite the problems, the techies find time to party down – especially when Mary the receptionist drops in by surprise and breaks out Joel’s booze. Meanwhile, back inside Joel’s head he has now definitely decided he doesn’t want to forget Clementine at all and retreats to his childhood to escape the treatment. We see him in his jammies under the kitchen table and other kiddie scenes with Clementine in one form or another. When the frolicking Lacuna-crowd return to Joel’s brain-screen they discover he’s off the board. Howard is called in. But by this time Joel and his girl are tripping from Grand Central Station where people and luggage are being erased, to a big bed on the beach, to a parade of elephants where they recite the Pope poem to each other. Elephants … memory? Just a thought …

Lacuna Inc. very quickly goes belly-up. Howard has problems of his own. And all tapes and paperwork are returned. And back in reality after one more tiff, standing in Joel’s hallway, they finally agree that this is how all love-life is. “Don’t you see?” she says. “I’ll get bored with you, and you’ll hate me … Shall we give it another try?” Really smiling for the first time in the film, Joel says, “Okay.”

Fade to white as they play like children on Montauk Beach.