I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
dir. Charlie Kaufman
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Netflix
Not since Darren Aronofsky’s mother! in 2017 has a movie so successfully and hauntingly evoked an oneiric state as Charlie Kaufman’s fever dream vision I’m Thinking of Ending Things. If I were a more clever writer, I might invent a Kaufmanesque conversation between the two filmmakers, in which Aronofsky calls to praise Kaufman’s idiosyncratic and disturbing new work of art. Since I’m not that clever, you’ll have to settle for a more standard review in which I praise Kaufman’s unique vision while also wrestling with a few of the picture’s shortcomings.
The film – loosely based on Iain Reid’s 2016 debut novel – ostensibly tells the story of a young woman named, well, we never really know, hence the use of the word “ostensibly.” She’s listed in the credits as “Young Woman,” but the character is referred to throughout the movie by several names, including Lucy – that’s what I’ll call her for the purposes of this review – Louisa, and Lucia.
Lucy is traveling with Jake, her new boyfriend of six or eight weeks – she can’t seem to remember just how long it’s been – to meet his parents for the first time and to have dinner with them. Over the course of the day-trip, Lucy begins to experience reality in a more and more fractured and unsettling way. Jake’s parents seem to change in age over the course of the evening, for example. Lucy sees them in their 50s, their 30s, and their 80s, but things really get weird when she and Jake leave the middle-of-nowhere farmhouse for the return trip home.
Just as in his masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York and, well, every other work in which Kaufman’s been the driving creative force, Ending Things is dripping with existential crisis and dread. Kaufman explores themes like fear of aging, identity dissociation, and the unreliability of time with his signature disorienting style and black humor.
Only in a Charlie Kaufman project will the movie stop down to take a shot at both cheesy romantic comedies and Hollywood director Robert Zemeckis. Order Up!, the fake movie-within-a-movie that Ending Things cuts to as a character watches the DVD on his lunch break, doesn’t just serve as a quick joke. Kaufman uses it to further disorient us when plot points in Order Up! begin to bleed into Lucy and Jake’s story. (Kaufman insists he isn’t slamming Zemeckis, and the director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Back to the Future seemed to get the joke by giving his blessing for Kaufman to use his name.)
Kaufman’s preoccupation with solipsism becomes more apparent as we get deeper into the film and begin to realize that this isn’t really Lucy’s story, but Jake’s. It was a bit disappointing when I realized the movie had tricked me into thinking it was centered around a woman, only to reveal her character was a projection of Ending Things’s real protagonist, Jake. I won’t go so far as to call the film misogynistic, but it flirts with the idea that women are interchangeable in the minds of men, and they’re useful only so long as men feel the need to obsess over them.
For his part, Kaufman tries to shield himself from just this critique when he inserts a couple of knowing nods to shitty male behavior. Jake’s insistence to his girlfriend on the brilliance of David Foster Wallace is one. It instantly brought to my mind an essay on the topic by Deirdre Coyle, and I’m dying to know if Kaufman has read it.
Jake also becomes uncomfortably defensive as he and Lucy discuss the John Cassavetes film A Woman Under the Influence on the drive home. Jake praises the film for actress Gena Rowlands’s hypnotic performance as a housewife suffering a mental breakdown. In her retort, Lucy begins to recite, word for word, film critic Pauline Kael’s famous takedown of the film. Jake sheepishly acknowledges Lucy’s/Kael’s assessment – she calls Influence “Freudian misogynistic claptrap” – and he fails to offer any meaningful counterargument. I don’t know that I’ve ever identified more with a character’s sense of intellectual inferiority. The fact that the feeling comes from not one but two women says something about Kaufman, and, I fear, myself, although my own neuroticism allows for men to make me feel equally intellectually inferior.
(I’d never been happier I could pause a movie when I’m Thinking of Ending Things had me scrambling to reference my copy of one of Kael’s books of her collected reviews, For Keeps, which makes a brief appearance in an early scene of Ending Things. And in case you’re curious, no, her review for A Woman Under the Influence isn’t included in For Keeps. Kaufman would undoubtedly be delighted that I stopped his movie to check.)
The dream state aesthetic that Kaufman conjures for Ending Things is a highlight of the movie. It kept me off balance, like how I could never quite pin down when the movie is supposed to be happening. Lucy has an iPhone (and she keeps getting phone calls from, inexplicably, herself) but Jake’s car is only equipped with a radio. For attentive viewers, little touches like neither Jake nor Lucy wearing their seat belts also gives the impression of an earlier time period.
Kaufman makes bold, disorienting stylistic choices, like when his camera moves in anticipation of the action. At one point, Jake gets up from the couch in his parents’ farmhouse in order to turn on the record player. The camera starts to dolly away from Jake to the stereo before Jake has even had a chance to get up.
The impeccable cast of Ending Things adds to the writer/director’s unique vision. David Thewlis – who worked with Kaufman on 2015’s animated Anomalisa – and the inimitable Toni Collette turn in two of the weirdest, most hypnotic performances of the year. Entire essays could be written about Collette’s awkward, exaggerated laughing fits.
Jesse Plemons, as Jake, continues to prove he can do just about anything. He is by turns menacing, funny, and melancholy as his character loses himself in his memories and fantasies. Jessie Buckley gives a breakout performance as Lucy. At its heart, Ending Things might really be Jake’s story, but Buckley makes us feel Lucy’s panic as her sanity starts to disintegrate. She is magnetic any time she’s on screen.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things will probably become a richer experience with repeated viewings. It is a puzzle box of a movie. With his sardonic dark humor and preoccupation with existential crisis, Kaufman has made one of the most challenging and interesting movies of the year. The world is a better, weirder, and more interesting place with Charlie Kaufman in it making art.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Charlie Kaufman is one of the most unique filmmakers working today. I’m Thinking of Ending Things adds to his perplexing, near-impenetrable body of work. There are layers to this movie that I won’t even pretend to understand. It’s melancholic, hilarious, and a complete mind trip.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I didn’t mention it in the review, but I was particularly affected by seeing Jake’s parents at various ages. We see Jake’s father suffering from dementia, and his mother become a frail, bed-ridden woman who needs help just to eat. Kaufman nails the existential terror of seeing this happening to loved ones.
- Kaufman and his cinematographer, Łukasz Żal – who worked on the stunning films Loving Vincent and Cold War – used the 4:3 aspect ratio, which keeps the framing tight and makes every two-shot between Jake and Lucy feel that much more intimate. The podcast Filmspotting did a great interview with director Kelly Reichardt in which she talks about why she thinks 4:3 is “the most flattering ratio for closeups.” Give it a listen here.
- How to know you are watching a Charlie Kaufman movie: When, in your notes, you write something like this: “[The] windshield wipers are like a hypnotic metronome.”
- More existential ruminations from Lucy: “Other animals live in the present. Humans cannot, so they invented hope.”
- Didn’t we all mistakenly think at some point that the Trivial Pursuit Genus Edition was called the Genius Edition?
- Someone in the makeup department of this film deserves an Oscar for the amazing old-age makeup applied to Toni Collette and David Thewlis.
- Hats off to Jessie Buckley for both her Pauline Kael and Gena Rowlands impressions!
- This is the kind of movie that, when I read several other reviews after writing my own, made me realize just how little insight I had into it. Frankly, I felt like an idiot, but watching it and wrestling with my reaction to it through writing was exhilarating.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Netflix. I’ve decided to venture out into the world of theatrical exhibition for my next review. I still don’t feel quite safe sitting in an enclosed room full of people yet (especially considering this infographic), so I’ll be seeing Tenet from the safety of my own car at a drive-in theater. This will be my first drive-in movie since I was… five years old? Maybe six?