A ‘Spotless’ reminder about the power of emotion

I haven’t taken an actual survey, but I suspect I’m the last film critic to have a say on “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the off-kilter romance written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry. Why I kept my distance and how I came to change my mind have a bearing on how movies function in our culture as well as in our own not-so-spotless minds.

Frankly, I’d avoided seeing “Eternal Sunshine” for weeks because it looked like everything I’d hate in a film. Though I was an admirer of Kaufman’s screenplays for “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich,” I’d loathed his first collaboration with Gondry, “Human Nature,” a film that attempted to make virtues of excessive cutesiness and painful artificiality.

The over-the-top coming attractions for “Spotless Mind” did nothing to calm my fears. Neither did a look at the impressive DVD collection of music video work with artists such as Beck, Bjork and Daft Punk that had made Gondry’s reputation. These pieces couldn’t have been more coldly dazzling visually, and that was the problem: The kind of verifiable personal connection I would need in a film that was billed as a romance seemed beyond this director’s power to deliver.

And once I did see it, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” had some of the things I feared it would, maybe even a lot of them. I noticed glibness, indulgence, artificiality, whatever. But there was something else here, something I hadn’t counted on, something that almost against my will turned this film into one of my favorites of the year. That would be emotion, honestly and unapologetically displayed. Not only does “Spotless Mind’s” story illustrate true feelings overcoming hellacious obstacles, but the way its techniques work on our psyches follows the same trajectory.

The most obvious ally “Spotless Mind” has is the use it’s made of a fine central notion, the idea that it is possible to completely erase all traces of someone from your memory. On an impulse, Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) has it done to forget the beau with whom she’s been having a hard time, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), and he retaliates in kind. But in an exceptional twist, just as the weird scientists led by Tom Wilkinson and Mark Ruffalo are trying to finish their work, these two, somewhere in the recesses of their minds, discover they still care about each other and try to subvert the process.

This compound notion is brilliant because it represents the one thing no romantic film can exist without: a formidable obstacle to love. As a shrewd studio executive pointed out to me when the Whoopi Goldberg-Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore “Ghost” was becoming a monster hit, these obstructions are getting harder and harder to find. Things that served generations of novelists perfectly well -- differences in class, in wealth, in religion, in ethnicity, even simple parental disapproval -- no longer carry the weight they once did. Death (as in “Ghost”) still has the clout it needs, as does memory erasure here.

The right guy for the job

But because erasure is a futuristic sci-fi concept rather than a reality and “Spotless Mind” aims to be a here-and-now story, a director was needed who could naturally bridge that gap and create a world that is half real and half not. With its backward storytelling, multiple time shifts and memory leaks, plus its casual mastery of several kinds of unconscious and dream states, “Spotless Mind” needed someone who was at ease conveying tricky, disjointed material. Gondry’s edgy, twisted style could hold our interest while simultaneously letting us in on what screenwriter Kaufman describes as “what it might be like in someone’s mind.”

So although the director would have been an obstacle on other films, he was a smart choice here. His removed, potentially irritating technique turns out to be what’s needed to sell a concept that brings so much romantic emotion to the table that it doesn’t need a sob sister director to relate it to us. Who better to craft a one-of-a-kind hybrid, the bastard child of Philip K. Dick and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” than the man who ended up in charge?

Having their setting so convincingly constructed undoubtedly aided the actors, especially stars Carrey and Winslet. It helped them attain a level of emotional conviction that’s especially difficult in an over-the-edge tale but that’s essential if the story is to move us.

Carrey, as pulled back and genuinely natural as he’s ever been, is sensitivity itself, a timid soul who “falls in love with every woman who shows me the least bit of attention.” Winslet goes in the opposite direction, playing someone both forceful and insecure who sums up both parts of her personality by saying, “Sorry if I come off sort of nutso.”

Slowly, like some kind of emotional stealth attack, the sincerity and conviction these actors carve inch by inch out of their indifferent world wins you over. They miraculously create a structure that can support sadness and regret if it needs to, a film about the elusiveness and evanescence of happiness, about why we have to fight for it as hard as we can and why it is worth the battle.

As they use increasingly desperate corners of their memories to hide their love from the prying eyes of relentless scientists, Carrey and Winslet tear at us in ways that are more potent for being the last thing you’d expect from a style of visual storytelling that’s both meticulous and excessive.

I’ve saved the best for last. As I walked out of the theater into the multiplex lobby, still a bit staggered by what I’d seen, I suddenly turned around to look for the film’s poster. Instead I saw right in front of me a young couple enclosed in the kind of sincere, passionate embrace usually not seen off-screen. They knew, as I did, that you never want to underestimate the power of cinematic emotion. Movies that move us truly have an element of magic in them, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Kenneth Turan is a Times film critic. He can be reached at calendar@latimes.com.