Grade: B

Verdict: A funny/melancholy mindbender about love and memory.

Maybe you ripped up photos of an old flame. Maybe you burned some love letters. Maybe you wallowed in a puddle of post-breakup blues.

But what if you didn't have to go through all that effort and could skip the depression, too? That's the premise of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," the latest from sly-cerebral writer Charlie Kaufman ("Adaptation," "Being John Malkovich"). It's a wintry, wistful look at the challenge of finding, and keeping, love. And it dramatizes that old saying, "Be careful what you wish for."

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play lovers Joel and Clementine, an opposites-attract couple. He's self-conscious and retiring. She's self-dramatizing and as in-your-face as her ever-changing hair color, whether it's firecracker red or a shade called "Blue Ruin." Their styles don't gel. As Joel puts it to the chattery Clem, "Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating."

So they argue a lot, no surprise. What is a surprise is the day Joel visits Clementine at the bookstore where she works ... and she doesn't recognize him.

It turns out that, tired of all the spats, she made an appointment at Lacuna Inc. That's where friendly Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and his staff provide a medical service that wipes unwanted memories from the brain. Think of it as a bad-love lobotomy.

As a matter of fact, much of "Sunshine" takes place in Joel's brain as he undergoes his own Clementine-wipe . . . then decides, as the memories are smudged out one by one, that he doesn't want to lose them after all. The result is a funhouse tour of Joel's cerebrum as he tries to hide Clem away in memories that didn't actually involve her. Like being bathed by his mom in the kitchen sink as an infant, or getting picked on by neighborhood kids.

To tell more would be to spoil some of the bigger surprises in "Sunshine," which also stars Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst and Elijah Wood as Mierzwiack's assistants. Their own love lives turn out to be as messy and entangled as Joel and Clem's, and the actors bring quirky, unexpected twists to their roles.

One of the film's unexpected pleasures is Carrey's change-of-pace performance as a shy, sensitive schlub. He's nearly unrecognizable. You believe it when Joel reflects that he's the kind of guy who will "fall in love with every woman who shows me the least bit of attention."

Like Carrey, Winslet takes real risks, gleefully blurring the line between free spirit and royal pain. Neither character is especially "lovable" in the usual Hollywood way; he's recessive, she's prickly, and you want to shake them both out of their extremes. Yet, while we see what drives them crazy about each other, we also see what drives them, well, crazy in a good way.

Screenwriter Kaufman one-ups himself with a script even more cleverly convoluted than anything he's written before. He's one of the rare produced Hollywood writers who trusts the audience to engage with a demanding, mind-tickling puzzle of a movie. If you re-imagined "Memento" as a romantic semi-comedy, you'd be close.

So why doesn't "Sunshine" quite dazzle the way it could? Maybe it's the director, Michel Gondry, whose first feature was the uneven, barely released "Human Nature" (2001 with Tim Robbins and Patricia Arquette), also by Kaufman. While "Sunshine" is the better film, Gondry seems to lack the spark of kinship that's shared by Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, who shot both "Malkovich" and "Adaptation."

The film's first 10 minutes play like a mopey, lonely-hearts drama in competition at Sundance. The gray-palette drabness (of icy city streets and dreary apartments) continues throughout the movie, even in the scenes inside Joel's memory. You can appreciate Gondry's resistance to turning "Sunshine" into a wacky day-glo romp, which is how the movie's misleading trailers represent it. But the tone seems a little . . . off, a little unsure. A minor complaint, though.

As techno-wacky and surreal as the movie gets, what gives it a genuine, beating heart is Kaufman's insight about relationships. They aren't easy, he's saying, but they're vital. The flaws, the arguments, the pet peeves -- these are the necessary tradeoffs for human connection.

In the end, "SunshineÕs" wintry mood is warmed by the idea that two people, even knowing that they failed to make a go of it before, might be brave enough to play the game of love again -- memories wiped, sure, but with eyes wide open.