I’m probably about to lose whatever street cred I may have had as an intellectual observer of movies, but I simply can’t carry on the charade any longer: I don’t get Charlie Kaufman.

Oh, he’s an okay screenwriter — movies made from his scripts don’t offend me aesthetically, viscerally, or morally, and they’re always interesting enough to warrant at least one viewing. But to hear certain professional critics and some of my film-loving friends, the guy is a genius whose praises will be sung from the top of Olympus, and I just don’t see that. His first big film, Being John Malkovich, was postmodern as defined by Moe on The Simpsons, “weird for the sake of being weird.” His follow-up, Adaptation, was much more straightforward, both in subject matter and approach, but it struck me largely as an exercise in self-indulgence (“I can’t figure out how to actually adapt this difficult non-fiction book, so I’ll create a fictional version of myself and write about how damn hard it is to adapt this difficult non-fiction book. Only I’ll make the fictional version of me much more screwed up than I actually am, and give him a cool twin brother that’s more like the me I wish I was. Then I’ll really wow all the intellectuals in the audience by having the fictional me say he doesn’t want to write a formula picture with a romance and guns and a chase scene, but then I’ll insert a romance, guns and a chase scene. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. That’ll be good, and everyone will say that I’m ever so clever and subversive…”) And now we come to his latest venture, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman’s most accessible and meaningful film yet, but one that still is missing… something.

The story bears more than a passing resemblence to the work of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. For those who aren’t familiar with him, Dick was interested in the idea that human beings are defined by our memories, and in the question of what will happen to us once we learn how to manipulate those memories. In Eternal Sunshine, we meet an ordinary guy, played by Jim Carrey, who has decided to have all his memories of his ex-girlfriend (Titanic‘s Kate Winslet) erased after learning that she has had the same procedure done to remove her memories of him. The bulk of the movie takes place inside Carrey’s mind as he and the viewer re-experience moments from his relationship with Winslet and then see them altered or destroyed by the erasing process.

Carrey gradually comes to realize that the pain of the relationship’s ending is balanced by the joy of its beginnings, and he really doesn’t want to lose his recollections of that joy — or, more importantly, of the way he felt about himself when times were good. And so his mind begins to rebel, to try and find some means of hiding a handful of important moments from a relentless onslaught of forgetfulness.

As bizarre and science-fictiony as that sounds, the film is really less interested in the mechanics of the erasing procedure and Carrrey’s fight against it as it is in dissecting a failed relationship. The movie shows us the relationship in reverse, beginning with the break-up and moving backwards towards its beginning. Normally, I dislike this sort of gimmicky chronology in my movies, but for this story it is entirely appropriate. The plot structure mimics the thought processes of anyone who has lost someone, as the anger and hurt gradually fades and is replaced by the understanding that it wasn’t all bad. The movie is bittersweet in the same way as thoughts of an old love now long gone. Its most poignant scene comes as Carrey’s conscious “present-time” self, standing within the disintegrating memory of his first meeting with Winslet, expresses the regret he feels not only at losing the memory but at what he should have done at that moment instead of what he actually did do. It is in that moment that the viewer really understands how these two complemented each other. It is in that moment that we believe in these characters and their love and in the horror of what they are having done to themselves by a doctor who claims to be helping them to “move on,” but who really isn’t helping anything at all.

Unfortunately, this moment comes late in a film that, for the most part, rarely shows a genuine spark of humanity. And this is the problem I have with all the movies I’ve seen that were written by Charlie Kaufman. He’s great with ideas and themes — he understands how human beings tick on an intellectual level — but his approach to the material is too clinical for it to really resonate. It seems to me that he’s more interested in being unique and clever than in helping the viewer enter his world.

In all three of the Kaufman movies I’ve seen, I only occasionally identified with the characters. Most of the time, I felt like a dispassionate observer. I thought at first that this wasn’t Kaufman’s fault so much as the director’s. However, Eternal Sunshine wasn’t directed by Kaufman’s usual collaborator, Spike Jonze, and so the problem remains. I’ve read one critic of Eternal Sunshine who does blame the director for the film’s failure, saying that directorial gimmicks impede Kaufman’s “emotional force.” But I think this critic — Sean Means of the Salt Lake Tribune — ascribes the film’s problems to the wrong source. The surrealistic visuals seen in Carrey’s changing memories perfectly suit the story, and the recursive story elements that frame the memory-erasing middle are surely Kaufman’s doing rather than the director’s. That tells me that my inability to connect with films based on Kaufman scripts more than likely comes from some aspect of Kaufman’s writing.

The casting of Jim Carrey as the hero is also problematic. I have no problem with Carrey or with his attempts to reinvent himself as a serious actor. I’ve liked all of his dramatic films to one degree or another, and I feel that he is inching closer to respectability with each serious role he takes. However, he just can’t seem to shake his slapsticky persona and it intrudes into Eternal Sunshine in a couple of scenes that just don’t ring true with the rest of the material (while trying to hide from the erasing beam, Carrey and Winslet stumble into Carrey’s early childhood memories, which of course gives Carrey the chance to fall into his old silly-mugging-and-funny-voice routines. Once he went into this familiar territory, I found myself starting to disbelieve the movie. Although I must say that I liked the sight of Kate Winslet in white go-go boots…)

I guess my reaction to Carrey in Eternal Sunshine mirrors my reaction to the movie itself. I really wanted to like him in the role, and for the most part I did, but there were moments in which I resisted his presence. My reaction to the film was the same: I wanted to like it, for the most part I did, but it just wasn’t as effective, ultimately, as it should’ve been. Once again, Charlie Kaufman has produced a screenplay that is intellectually interesting and worth a look, but doesn’t quite work for me.