Jim Carrey once again attempts to be taken serious as an actor along with Kate Winslet playing a Madonna manque in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Shapeless but with lots of tricks, writer Charles Kaufman's banal dialogue has to be rescued on cue by either a surreal happening or reversing course in jarring fashion. A romantic, science fiction hybrid, it fails miserably on both levels.

Two misfits meet in Montauk one cold morning. Sad sack Joel (Carrey) and mercurial Clementine (Kate Winslet) somehow click and a romance begins. When besotted Joel visits her with gifts at the store she does not even recognize him. It turns out she's had a procedure to erase Joel from memory. Joel pained by the experience decides he wants to go through the same procedure under the guidance of a trio of irresponsible assistants.(Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood). In the interim the story confusingly switches from reality to Joel's haywire procedure allowing the director Michael Gondry to work on a variety of levels.

Simpering and slovenly Carrey once again fails to register dramatically, his hang down demeanor and sheepish poor lugubrious me turn one extended self pity party of dealing with past, present and supernatural. Winslet is whimsically trying while Dunst, Ruffalo and Wood dimwit stooges spout insipid dialogue and act like 10 year olds.

There's a handful of eye popping visuals but cinematographer Ellen Kuras lensing is pedestrian in moments, especially around lighting. Given the freedom of padding human emotion with sci-fi both writer and director make the most of these liberties but in doing so fail to tell a coherent, grounded story with this overall shallow and disheveled slight of hand film.