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Celebrated screenwriter Charlie Kaufman specializes in clever ideas and stunt plots: from the Spike Jonze debut "Being John Malkovich" to "Human Nature" and last year's Oscar-nominee "Adaptation," the watchword is quirky. His latest collaboration with former music video wunderkind Michael Gondry follows the same trajectory: a handsome cast, a few displays of wit, and the patented skullduggery that is the center of all his films.

A kind of M. Night Shyamalan with artistic pretensions, Kaufman likes to mess with expectations as much as he likes to mess with people's heads. In "Eternal Sunshine," Kaufman turned his approach into a plot point. The story concerns seemingly boring Joel (Jim Carrey), his girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet), who changes hair color in every scene, and a mysterious firm that can erase people's memories. But what exactly is the relationship between the three, and why do Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst, and Mark Ruffalo occasionally stumble through the story? In the beginning, Kaufman's script and Gondry's frantic direction -- with its disorienting montage and frequent flashbacks -- managed to keep me intrigued.

Metaphysical mysteries have a great tradition in the movies, perhaps because the image on the screen is already something of a shared hallucination. We take everything we see in a movie to be real, even though we know it is fake?so when filmmakers start showing dreams, hallucinations, or artificially induced memories, the possibilities for mischief are as endless as Alfred Hitchcock was wide.

Incidentally, it was Hitchcock who warned against showing anything that didn't "really happen" on the screen because it would undermine the trust between audience and director. Filmmakers who have ignored Hitch's advice with varying results include the Paul Verhoeven ("Total Recall"), Christopher Nolan ("Memento"), the Wachowski Brothers ("The Matrix"), Terry Gilliam ("Brazil"), Ingmar Bergman ("Wild Strawberries"), David Lynch ("Lost Highway") and Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris"), Cameron Crowe via Alejandro Amenábar ("Vanilla Sky"/"Open Your Eyes") ? and that's just off the top of my head.

In the hands of a master like Tarkovsky or Bergman, the story of "Eternal Sunshine" might have turned into a poignant, touching rumination on memory and loss, but an ordinary Jim Carrey and the spunky Kate Winslet never click as lovers, and Gondry doesn't have the finesse for anything deeper than canned Hallmark emotion. In the film's darkest moments, the erasure of consciousness should have been terrifying. David Lynch or Terry Gilliam could have turned those scenes into the stuff of your worst nightmares, but Gondry employs laughable carnival effects. Elsewhere, when he ought to be subtly funny, he milks every sight gag for maximum impact.

The trio of hard-partying brain workers played by Ruffalo, Dunst, and Wood provides far and away the most fun in "Eternal Sunshine." The bad kids literally drink and dance on top of the unfolding melodrama?until they become one themselves. Still, Dunst's subplot is much more involving than Carrey and Winslet's. (And we could stand to see a lot more movies starring Mark Ruffalo dancing in his jockeys.)

The initial brain-warping confusion makes "Eternal Sunshine" engrossing for a while, until the setup becomes all too obvious. By the third act, the glow has worn off, and the film plods towards its inescapable finale with deadly familiarity. Gondry and Kaufman's novelty item turns out to be just another Hollywood romance, and not a very convincing one at that.