Delayed Reaction: I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Premise: A woman contemplates ending her relationship...then weird shit happens.

I get it, Charlie Kaufman. You're smart.

 

Look, I love Charlie Kaufman. That man's mind works differently than virtually anyone else's. His screenplays for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation are wonderfully mind-bending. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was pretty good too.

 

I don't think I'm built for him as a director. I've put off Synecdoche, New York for over a decade because it's only every been described as a mind fuck or depressing. Anomalisa devastated me when I saw it. It's ruined my night. I think it was well made and got to some profound truths about the human experience. It was just too much for me.

 

I'm Thinking of Ending Things is the first time one of Kaufman's movies just felt pretentious*. Other than some of the performances, I had trouble finding anything to like in the movie. The long conversations between Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons in the car often felt like ramblings Kaufman scribbled from a late-night debate with intellectual friends. The scenes with the parents were just plain annoying. I don't like when filmmakers have contempt for characters and are punching down at them. Everything until Buckley and Plemons get to the high school was fine though. I didn't care for it, but I felt like I got it. Everything after that got too self-consciously weird.

 

*I haven't read the book. I did check out the Wikipedia page, and it sounds much more straightforward than the movie Kaufman made, so I'm crediting his authorial voice to a lot of the movie. 

 

The reason I've always like Kaufman so much is that the oddness always served a clear purpose. He has a gift for taking really complex narrative ideas and making them digestible. It always felt like he wanted people to understand his thoughts. I'm Thinking of Ending Things is the first time I've seen him give up on that idea. The final act of the movie moves into more of a David Lynch mode where he puts the onus on the audience to understand. I appreciate the idea of creating an active dialogue between the audience and the film in that way, but at a certain point open-ended becomes indistinguishable from poorly thought out. If you told me that Kaufman couldn't crack the ending of the movie and settled with this, I couldn't point to anything to disprove you. That's very annoying and feels like a cop out.

 

Then there's the fact that much of this movie feels like Kaufman revisiting familiar tricks. The movie is big on playing with perception. Actors are recast randomly for short scenes. Pictures change the first and second time they are shown. Character change locations without explanation. These are all things his movies have done before. Up until the high school scenes, I noted that this movie was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind without the romance.

 

Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons are very good at what they are asked to do. I really have no complaints with them. The performances are consistent and interesting. They know exactly what is asked of them and deliver that.

 

Kaufman's skill as a director isn't in question either. He and his collaborators shoot the hell out of this movie, whether it's the bleakness of the snowy car rides or the disorienting experience in the farmhouse. The good doesn't outweigh the bad though for me. And it seems strange to point at the story as the weakness in a Charlie Kaufman movie. Even if I take out the ending that feels like he gave up on, the rest of the movie is just cold drive to nowhere.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend