I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

I'm thinking of rending things

Charlie Kaufman's latest, a reasonably close adaptation of Iain Reid's novel, may provoke the desire to tear the Netflix-platformed film--or anything handy within reach for that matter--to little bits. It's that polarizing, I think.

Haven't read the book--glanced at the summary on Wikipedia. That's how I managed to clear up the last fifteen minutes, and how I suspect most folks come to understand the plot; either that or watch the whole thing over several times, and I suspect most who chose the latter still end up resorting to the Wikipedia summary.

Much of the film is legitimately intriguing--young woman (referred as such in close captioning, IMDb, Wikipedia, and played with unanonymous delicacy by Jessie Buckley) is taking a long drive with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons, nicely pathetic-creepy) to visit his parents, and their trip out and later trip back are in my book the main reasons for watching. Kaufman is master of what the better-known Tarantino dabbles amateurishly at, the meandering deceptively pointless conversation--the former's references and allusions are more wide-ranging, are not limited to pop culture trivia or pulp genre flicks (though he does quote heavily from Oklahoma! and shows a clip from a syrupy nonexistent romcom 'Directed by Robert Zemeckis'). Emotions between the pair arc like heat lightning, fragile and elusive despite the fact that both seem like basically decent people (unlike in Tarantino one is not intent on kneecapping the other, at least not initially). The young woman--at this point called Lucy--recites a poem she wrote called "Bonedog" (actually by Eva H.D.): "you think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you have just come from with fondness / because everything’s worse once you’re home." Jake exclaims "Sounds like it was written for me!"--you wonder if perhaps he's as eager to reach their destination as she (in effect: not really). Buckley is amazing here: she eases into the poem with the reluctance of a migrating goose driven despite exhaustion to continue flapping, her voice like wavering webbed feet occasionally scraping gravel.

At Jake's house the uncomfortable pauses and embarrassed moments continue: the mother (Toni Collette) waves from a second floor window but Jake refuses to enter just yet--he leads Lucy to the nearby barn where he tells her the horrifying story of how they once had to put down their two pigs; in the living room the couple wait an interminably long time, to the point that Lucy is forced to ask "Your parents knew we were coming, right?" Finally the aforementioned progenitors descend (the mother calling her "Lucia") and they all sit before a dinner that appears from nowhere, laid out in the adjacent dining room. 

Kaufman is full of such narrative tricks and oddities; Lucy muses to herself and Jake suddenly asks "Did you say something?" We hear her in voiceover quoting Jake about stopping for coffee: "last chance we'll have before it becomes really farmy," he warns in her voice; later he repeats a variation of the line ("It's going to get pretty farmy pretty fast now")--the woman refuses both offers. An unnamed old man gazes out his kitchen window at a brightcolored swing set standing in his grassy yard; later the young woman gazing out her car window spots the exact same swing set in snow, standing before an abandoned ruin. 

How did Jake read Lucy's thoughts? Why can Lucy anticipate Jake's questions? What's with the doppelganger swing set?

Turns out--and folks who haven't seen Kaufman's latest headscratcher can skip the rest of this article--Lucy, or Louise, or Lucia, or Ames (?), an aspiring poet / painter / quantum physicist / gerentologist, is a figment of Jake's imagination, inspired by a girl he glimpsed at once in a diner but never had the nerve to approach, cobbled together from details of other girls he's seen, but never really spoken to.

And this pretty much sums up my problem with Kaufman. He's maybe the smartest scriptwriter working in Hollywood; not necessarily the most imaginative but up there; arguably one of the most ambitious, but has--I don't know--trouble seeing beyond his own admittedly capacious, prodigiously overstuffed back yard. Time and time again from Being John Malkovich to Adaptation to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Anomalisa he tells the story of adolescent-minded males desperate to make a lasting connection with a female--a cure for loneliness if you will.

Arguably he's made a fetish of this consistency, even wielded it Borglike against the most unlikely material--Adaptation was hilarious because Kaufman faced with the prospect of struggling with an unKaufmanlike novel (Susan Orleans' The Orchid Thief) in desperation resorts to writing about the metacomical struggle of remaking the book in his image. I like Anomalisa best partly because it's an inventive idea elegantly realized, partly because its one distinct female character--Jennifer Jason Leigh's Lisa--develops enough poignant tang to pierce the boundaries carefully established for her. Young woman in this project comes straight from Reid's novel but falls so perfectly into Kaufman's scheme of idealized figures of desire you can imagine Kaufman dreaming up the character, the novel, even the author writing the novel. 

I didn't fall in love with her, though; don't quite believe in her as a living independent entity, despite Kaufman's insistence in an interview that that's what he hoped for his characters. She's a complex enigmatic...void...at the center of the film, like Mabel from John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, who she tears apart by quoting a Pauline Kael article, delivered in an uncannily dead-on Pauline Kael voice. 

Which I could forgive, actually; I can accept voids and elliptical plots and undecipherable endings if when all is said and done I have something intriguing to look at. Kaufman achieves that visual fascination in spurts--in Jake's house when Lucy/Louise is caught offguard and faces either a foodladen table or a series of empty rooms; when she descends the proverbial dark basement or (better yet) ascends the proverbial creaky staircase to seek answers, or at least a handy washing machine to launder a soiled nightgown. In films like John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine Kaufman had a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to help bring his ideas to fluid graceful life on the big screen; if he lucked out with Anomalisa (which he directed himself, in my book his best work to date) that may be because he was dealing with stop-motion, which squelches his tendency to resort to fast editing (the enemy I submit of surreal imagery), which forces him to simplify and focus. Not on being obtuse, but on being honest; not on intellectual dead ends, but on everyday human relationships.  

I've heard I'm Thinking of Ending Things described as an ode to loneliness, to which I'd add 'white, male, middle-aged.' Within this narrowly self-prescribed territory he's managed to develop again and again ingenious even hilarious ways of exploring the landscape, and uncovered a surprising abundance of detail--a Hollywood celebrity serving as living vessel to an aging community; a Hollywood scriptwriter forced to invent himself an unscrupulous brother; a bland businessman who everywhere he looks hears the  voice of Tom Noonan. But his best breakthroughs I submit are when he strays from that territory, often unwillingly, sometimes unwittingly. Here's to more such departures, though I suppose I can't recommend them as a consistent artistic stratagem (the surprise, most of all to himself, is a big part of the pleasure). But one can always hope.