I must have missed the memo about March being remakes month, what with the releases of “Starsky & Hutch”, “Dawn of the Dead”, “The Ladykillers” and now “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”.  Is this a new Hollywood marketing niche? Is March becoming for remakes what June is for Jerry Bruckheimer? You may not think it belongs on that hallowed list, but the new Charlie Kaufman (he’s justifiably earned the status where people actually talk about going to see “the new Charlie Kaufman”) is, at heart, an update of one of the iconic movies of the Seventies.

Which one?  Would it help if I fed you the line “I’m having a life crisis”? How about “La de da, la de da”? That’s right, lucky moviegoer. Finally we have a remake of “Annie Hall” for the iPod set. A clever remake, granted. One that will make most of us think it’s almost sui generis (that’s Latin for box office poison). One that might make us forget that recently even Adam Sandler drew some of the same conclusions as Kaufman (and oh, how desperately I want to forget “50 First Dates”). But without revealing the ending, I can confidently assure those familiar with Allen’s masterpiece that they will realize, by the end of ‘Sunshine’, that Gondry and Kaufman are running the same treadmill. Look at the bright side. At least it’s not “Casablanca: Bennifered”.

If there is any doubt that ‘Sunshine’ is a twenty-first century remix of “Annie Hall”, just shed the suffocating dourness and narrative warp and there they are—the kooky and vivacious Her matched against the repressed but wryly funny Him. Joel (Jim Carrey) is an introspective man reliving his past to arrive at some conclusion about it. Clementine (Kate Winslet) is—well, what does any comedy ask of the female romantic lead, except to be daringly eclectic enough to draw out the hero but banal enough for him to love?  This movie’s got everything but Marshal McLuhan hiding behind a potted plant.

Even Annie’s signature black vest is reimagined as Clementine’s orange pullover. I’m not sure if that’s an improvement. That and her blueberry hair makes her look like a disheveled Slurpee. Strangely appetizing at times, I’ll admit, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d been the victim of a gang of taggers.

To discuss the central thesis that ‘Sunshine’ puts forth would be to engage in what grown men with “Highlander” lunchboxes like to call “spoilers”. Suffice it to say, in method if not in message, this film isn’t a country mile removed from “Adaptation” which, after all, boiled down to a shy guy pulling his hair out for two hours trying to work up the courage to ask a girl out. ‘Sunshine’ is a bizarre therapy session—imagine Proust liberally translated by Dr. Phil—that culminates in a lesson that’s simplicity itself. It shuffles along what’s called the scenic route.

Some scenic route though. Whatever their faults, Annie and Alvy at least had the virtue of Keaton’s charm and Allen’s  wisecracks. I wonder how likable audiences will find Clementine, a fickle, self-obsessed alcoholic, and Joel, a buttoned-up loner with subterranean self-esteem. Joel is particularly worrisome. Watch his drawings closely: Gondry allows a longer look at one or two of the milder sketches, but some of the ones that flash by in quicker shots look like cartoons copied from the cell walls of the Unabomber. The two leads are certainly alluring to watch—the lively Winslet is utterly adorable while the deep grooves in Carrey’s face give him a slacker Cary Grant appeal—but they’re dysfunction personified. Their version of love play is to smother each other with pillows in pretend homicides. Lovers like these make you long for the halcyon days of Mickey Rourke lapping Cool Whip out of Kim Basinger’s armpits.

Gondry picks up the slack with a dreamlike style that often resembles something between M.C. Escher and “The Blair Witch Project”. He and his effects crew found some nifty ways to show us the decay of Joel’s mind. A Barnes and Noble in which all the writing in all the books has been wiped clean is not, as it might appear, the official bookstore of the Bush Administration, but one of Joel’s fading memories. Later a house literally collapses around Clementine in a stunning metaphor for heartbreak and regret. This is exactly the kind of surrealistic wit needed for Kaufman’s screenplays, and in this case most of the genuinely affecting moments in the film—Clementine’s emotional outpouring to Joel under sheets that look like bright orange gauze, or the couple waking up in a bed on a snowy beach—come alive thanks to Gondry’s sensibility.

For his part, Kaufman writes painfully elliptical plots that lead to small but surprising payoffs. They’re few and far between, but they’re scenes that cannot be found anywhere else, and they set his films apart. That’s true here, as well, ranging from fun moments like Clementine watching some of Joel’s childhood humiliations to a harrowing, watch-through-your-fingers scene as Clementine and Joel (sort of) reveal how they really feel about each other (sort of). Kaufman seems to have worked out a rhythm for his audiences: long stretches of bewildered, uneasy laughter punctuated by fleeting moments in which all the wildly disparate elements suddenly mesh into beautiful clarity. I don’t know how it plays in Omaha, but it sure gets film critics to throw around the word ‘brilliant’ a lot.

But how many hand-wringing, sub-Freudian detours we have to take to reach those moments! It’s one thing to dramatize the mental process of a man discovering his own heart, but quite another to valorize lachrymose navel-gazing. I like deconstructed romantic comedies as much as the next guy who likes using the word ‘deconstructed’, but is it too much to ask for a few more Rom-Com “cute” scenes than the ones we’re given? Carrey and Winslet are fantastic together when we’re allowed the rare opportunity to imagine them as lovers instead of doomed holograms, and they’re even better opposite Jane Adams and the great David Cross. And why is this film so overbearingly precious with its hero’s emotions?  Why is there a subplot that wastes the considerable talents of Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst and Elijah Wood in a bald and frankly irrelevant device that nearly sinks the whole movie? Too many questions.

Kaufman’s problem is not that his screenplays are excessively clever. The problem is that there’s no exit from their cleverness. For all its funhouse amusements, “Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind” is an existential bummer unredeemed by the light breeze of giggles that flits through its musty labyrinth. Stumbles like Kaufman’s are far better than most of the other dross in our multiplexes, but given his awesome talent that’s not enough. Kaufman is apparently on easy terms with Nietzsche, quoting him here and in “Confessions of A Dangerous Mind”, and I wish he’d have remembered another facet of Nietzsche’s thought—levity, the importance of “killing the spirit of gravity”. In other words, as Allen has always understood, laughter conjured not for mere distraction but for grace.