Based upon the novel by Iain Reid
Written and Directed by Charlie Kaufman
***1/2 (three and a half stars)
RATED R
"...We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fishbowl
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here..."
-music and lyrics by Roger Waters
Pink Floyd "Wish You Were Here"
At this stage, it is becoming even more difficult to offer a review of a Charlie Kaufman experience.
From his spectacularly audacious full arrival to our cinematic consciousness with Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich" (1999) and "Adaptation" (2002), Kaufman proved himself to being an unapologetically, unrepentantly inventive writer, whose restlessly idiosyncratic stories defied categorization and presented cinematic universes unlike anything else we had seen with its regards to their rabbit hole journeys into our the multi-levels of our mental states, collective consciousnesses, personalities, and identities. And they were astoundingly comical as t hey turned what we felt the movies could be inside out and back again.
With Michel Gondry's "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless" (2004), Kaufman extended his reach into a larger and poignant emotional territory as he utilized the format of a break-up story combined with his mind bending aesthetic to explore the notions of the necessity of painful memoires being as essential as the pleasurable memories, as they each serve their crucial roles in building up the completeness of our personalities and possibly, our souls. Through its purity of originality and empathy, it was the finest love story of that cinematic decade for me.
Yet, the pinnacle was undoubtedly "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut. One of my top ten favorites films of its decade, Kaufman delivered an unforgettable masterpiece, of which I will delve into a tad more later in this posting. That being said, what I will offer at this time is that it was a film that boldly confronted our darkest worries and concerns in a fashion that forced viewers to think a bout the very concepts and themes that we rarely ever wish to think about due to their inherently disturbing, unsettling nature yet we need to in order to understand what it means to live and to die.
Since that period in Charlie Kaufman's career, his work has arrived more sporadically and while so welcomed when it does choose to arrive, it is a challenge as the work in question has grown only more confounding while also beginning to carry a certain weight of familiarity. With "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things," his first film in five years and his adaptation on the Iain Reid novel, Charlie Kaufman has realized a work that is no less original, demanding, challenging and as inscrutable as his previous efforts. But there is a degree of "been there-done that" to the proceedings, which, in pure Kaufman-esque fashion, may precisely exist as a knowing part of the overall design, which would then add an extra layer.
"I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" stars as an unnamed young woman (Jessie Buckley) who is in the throes of wondering the concept of the film's title with regards to her boyfriend of a few short weeks named Jake (Jesse Plemons). As she ponders the potential demise of their relationship, she has accepted Jake's invitation to take a trip out of town to his parents' (David Thewlis and Toni Collette) farm for dinner.
That is essentially the plot of the film and it certainly sounds simple. But, with anything that possesses Charlie Kaufman's name, we should expect to receive something that is not in the least bit simplistic. What Kaufman has delivered with "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" is another voyage deep into the recesses of our consciousness and sub consciousness, where our notions of individuality, personality, and identity exist, congeal and collide. It is a disturbing world where it feels like our private, and unspoken thoughts feel as if they can be overheard. Personality shifts spin upon a dime. Memories intertwine and blur, refusing to unwind and distinguish themselves from each other. Characters age forwards and backwards without warning. Disembodied voices are heard, as well as mysterious phone calls are received. And the full, open revelations of one's truest self, whether by oneself or via the words of another who knows you just as intimately, feel as intensely threatening as the a trap door in the floor just waiting to take you by surprise and swallow you whole.
The film is divided into three (or possibly four) distinct sections: the long, snowy car drive to the farm, the night at the farm, the longer, snowier drive back home and a final detour or two where the film takes a swan dive into the surreal and the mournful. Throughout the entirety of the film, Kaufman, working seamlessly with Cinematographer Lukaasz Zal, Composer Jay Wadley and Editor Robert Frazen, establishes a constant state of unease, which then builds into dread and confusion, which then builds into a sense of realization, tragedy and funhouse mirror finality, all the while evoking the tone of a dream drifting closer and closer to nightmare.
"I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" exists on such shifting sand that it is a miracle that any of the performances are effective at all and absolutely every one of them are excellent. Jessie Buckley exudes a superior grasp of the confounding proceedings, even as precarious as they are. David Thewlis and Toni Collette even moreso, as they each represent the passage of time, history and family dynamics.
Yet, it is indeed Jesse Plemons, who resembles somewhat of a cross between Matt Damon and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who just astonishes in the role of Jake, a taciturn figure who is simultaneously steadfast and impossible to fully pin down. Plemons elicits timidity and shyness, earnestness and eagerness just as easily as a certain arrogance and insensitivity, intelligence, romanticism, optimism and darkness, and fully packaged in a character that is warm enough to understand why our unnamed heroine would date him but sinister enough to make us want to yowl at the screen, warning her to run away.
As schizophrenic as all of this may sound, and actually is, Kaufman ensures the film itself advances with a consistently ominous atmosphere that suggests that nagging voice inside of our brains that alerts or torments us whenever we reach a certain fork in the road, that feeling we get that tells us to look over our shoulders for any oncoming danger even when we'd rather not, the pit in the stomach feeling that may reveal itself after we cross any emotional red lights. "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" exists at the precise point of decision/indecision and Charlie Kaufman is meticulously perceptive with the myriad of thoughts and viewpoints, both real and imagined, that arrive in those moments when the future is close enough to touch and the past is just that far behind.
And even so, what it is all about?
Undeniably, it would be a given to think that anyone who views "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" would be left scratching their heads at best. Even further, I would not be surprised if some viewers would stop watching entirely due to its impenetrable nature and escalating voyage into the surreal. Well, and without delving into really any of the film's trajectories and specific sequences, here are the feelings the film inspired and therefore, left me with...
To me, Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking Of Ending things" is a meditation on loneliness, regret, loss, delusions and ruminations upon choices not taken due to crippling self-confidence and the sense of self-loathing produced. It is a film where we are ensconced within the psychological terrain and trappings of interior spaces (a car, a house) and in turn, we, and the characters, are surrounded by history, memories, fears and ghosts of the very people that inhabited those spaces. The location of Jake's parents' farm house in fraught with the baggage of the lives that once existed within it, with the various rooms in the home housing the very crucial moments and experiences that ultimately give birth, evolution and death to the life of the environment itself.
And then, from locations, Kaufman takes us back into the self as he illustrates how the iconography of our lives are all built upwards from the various elements of pop and art culture that speak to us, and we ultimately we consume and attach to our growing personas, all of which invents our individualized perceptions of self. Kaufman extends even deeper as he shows how our personalities and personas are also influenced and created by every single person that has contributed to our lives, and so, we in turn for everyone else. Family, friends, acquaintances, influential members of our respective communities and even further than that, this includes everyone who literally does not exist in the material world. Characters from fiction, certainly. The perceptions that we invent about people, most definitely.
With "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things," show tunes, the film reviews of Pauline Kael and the final sequence of Ron Howard's "A Beautiful Mind" (2001) carry an equal weight to farm animal tragedies, a Dairy Queen-esque ice cream shop, custodian uniforms in the laundry and the death stares from the eternal disdain of pretty high school girls. Personalities and identities shift and alter to the degree that we are forced to question if what we are viewing is a duet or a monologue. And if it is either, is it external or internal? Is it taking place in a snap of a moment or over the full duration of a life? The heavy mental lifting is entirely up to us.
And even so, we have all been here before.
For me, the film trajectory of Charlie Kaufman has possessed a fully idiosyncratic evolution. Certainly, as we were wholly unfamiliar with a creative voice like his, the early films represented a certain excitement as it was a voice so foreign. We could view precisely how "Being John Malkovich" led to "Adaptation," built upwards to "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind" and then, reaching the pinnacle with "Synecdoche, New York." As I have previously written upon this site, I once had a friend who worked at a local, and now defunct video store, who loved "Synecdoche, New York" so completely and felt it to exhibit such perfection and completeness that he wished that Charlie Kaufman did not ever make another film again...for where else could he venture as he seemingly said EVERYTHING in that film?
Since "Synecdoche, New York," Kaufman has only helmed two films, the animated "Anomalisa" (2015) and the film I am writing about at this time. In some ways, Kaufman has perhaps proved my old video store clerk friend correct. In a sense, there is absolutely nothing here in "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" that we have not seen before...and to that end, even better. This is not to say that there is anything necessarily wrong with this new film, especially as I am giving it high praise overall. But, there is something lacking in the cumulative effect that has not happened in previous Kaufman movies. The earlier films are unforgettable. "Synecdoche, New York," in particular, is profoundly, devastatingly haunting. "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things," however, I haven't thought about terribly much at all since having seen it and I doubt that I would even revisit it. Not for any lack of quality but solely due to the impression I have that, again, Kaufman has travelled this road many times before and now it is decidedly less compelling.
All of Charlie Kaufman's cinematic efforts built up to "Synecdoche, New York" and now, everything after currently lives within that film's shadow. Even so, this sense of deterioration is baked fully into the Charlie Kaufman cake, so to speak, as all of his film to various degrees speak directly to the quandary of living and the disappointment that arrives with aging and mortality, regardless of the clichés we all tell ourselves in order to just keep placing one foot in front of the other as we constantly devise ways to justify our existence.
Charlie Kaufman more than understands this existential crisis and therefore, weaves it directly into the narrative and now, even into his life as an artist, where his grasp of his gifts will one day leave him due to anything from lack of inspiration to mortality. And so, being as perceptive as he clearly is, it almost makes his films critic-proof, as any perceived shortcomings from viewers feel less like criticisms and more like acknowledgements of the inevitable.
Yes, indeed a talent like Charlie Kaufman's has more than earned and deserves our celebration, due to his creativity and utter refusal to dumb even one iota down to fit into the masses' collective lowest common denominator leanings. But, there is indeed a fine line between labyrinthine storytelling and thumbing through a copy of the American Psychiatric Association's DMS 5 manual and attaching the traces of a plot to a disorder. Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking Of Ending Things" is an enigma, often magnetic in its power while also keeping us just this far out of reach.
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