A Cranial Kaleidoscope.

Rating: 7/10 (10 September 2013)

Jim Carey is a shy man who is more or less accosted by the extraverted Kate Winslet at a beach party. They begin an affair, then split up. Carey visits her at work, behind the counter at Barnes and Noble, but she has no idea who he is.
When he learns that she has had her memory of him neurologically erased, he seeks out the clinic that did the number on her and requests the same treatment. If she can forget about him, he can forget about her.
So the clinician in charge, Tom Wilkerson, hooks him up to this modernistic looking electronic junk and leaves him in the care of his assistant, Mark Ruffalo, and the receptionist, Kirsten Dunst. Wilkerson goes home to bed, since everything is proceeding normally.
Not for long. Although he is unconscious in this metal helmet and electrodes are planted in his scalp, Carey still can think, and after the procedure is underway he changes his mind and doesn't want to forget about Kate Winslet because he still loves her.
A conflict ensues within the confines of Carey's skull, causing little glitches to appear. On top of that, Ruffalo is distracted from the monitor by the seductive Dunst, who happens to look very good in her tiny skivvies, and soon the pair are stoned and boogieing around on the very bed on which the tortured Carey is laid out.
What follows is an often confusing and disjointed narrative of what's going on inside the head of Jim Carey. There are flashbacks, accelerated motion scenes, total fantasies, and jumbled reconstructions of events from Carey's past. For instance, he wakes up in bed with Winslet, except the bed is isolated on a snowy beach somewhere. The image is imaginative, jarring, and baffling -- all at the same time.
Alexander Pope's poem, part of which Dunst quotes to Wilkerson, is apt. It's from "Eloisa to Abelard", about two tragic 12th-century lovers who were torn apart from each other and sequestered. Abelard was castrated by Eloise's family. The lines express an envy of vestal virgins who were similarly isolated from the world of Ancient Rome, and who forgot the world outside, just as the world forgot about them. Mr. Leland expressed the same sentiment in "Citizen Kane," "I can remember everything. That's my curse, young man. It's the greatest curse that's ever been inflicted on the human race: memory."
I can no longer stand wobbling cameras, instantaneous editing, and other such directorial razzle dazzle, but the tricks here are kept within certain reasonable bounds and the interpolated scenes with Ruffalo and Dunst manage to keep us anchored in the very real present. I didn't get the significance of all of the scenes. I don't know why Carey and Winslet take turns smothering each other with a pillow, both during childhood and during their recent affair. They didn't know each other as children. Maybe it has to do with the unraveling of their relationship -- somehow, each finds the other "smothering." There isn't actually much chemistry between the quiet Carey and the whimsical Winslet. The complementarity theory of marriage has been shown not to work. It's a wonder that each put up with the other for as long as they did.
I didn't much care for the minced logic of "Brazil" either, but I still get a kick out of "Being John Malkovitch," which this resembles, only without the laughs from the absurd humor. Yet this movie isn't as bad as I'd expected it to be. The romantic element is confounding but at least is aimed at adults.