Review: I'm Thinking Of Ending Things
I've stared at this blinking cursor for what feels like 50 years, but is, in reality, 50 seconds. Writer-director Charlie Kaufman's films have a way of inducing these bouts of aphasic paralysis. There's so much to say, but so little room to say it. So, I'll try. Two of his previous works are similar in this way. His latest picture is the ominously titled I'm Thinking of Ending Things (based on a 2016 novel by Iain Reid of the same name). Those are: Anomalisa, his profoundly tidy exploration of profound and untidy emotions, and Synecdoche, New York, his rumination on mortality and legacy, identity and acceptance, and everything in between. Both of those films explored their respective characters' interiorities - their self-centeredness and guilt, their desire to leave some mark and to discover who they really are before sublimating identity altogether - to spectacular results. In those movies, in their stories, in their performances, in their images, we saw these actors grapple with conflicts we feel, we have felt, and we will feel. I'm Thinking of Ending Things is similarly interior in nature.
It tracks Lucy...sorry Louisa...I mean Lucia (Jessie Buckley, Beast, Wild Rose) as she keeps a terminally-ill relationship on life-support by accompanying her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons, Breaking Bad, The Irishman) to his wintry, rural home. There, she will meet his parents: billed simply as Mother (Toni Collette, The Sixth Sense, Hereditary), a twitchy, kind lady who laughs a hair too long at jokes and Father (David Thewlis, Anomalisa, Naked) a dad-jokey and profoundly nostalgic man, as well as their dog. But, the drive there and the journey back - two fractal portions of an increasingly surreal night - occupy just as much of this twisty tale through time and psyches as does the dreaded 'meet-the-parents' dinner. And, on these long, anticipatory and revelatory legs of their commute, their conversation drifts from neurology to existentialism to film critique (in a scene seemingly tailor-made, though not in a cloying way, to delight critics and avid readers of critique alike, Buckley recites, wholesale, a passage from legendary film critic Pauline Kael's review of Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence).
I am still untwisting, untangling this knotted and surreal tale of journeys; to a family home lost in a wintry limbo and to a time and place that seems to have arrived in a flash. Kaufman explores, with great prescience, or great luck, the discombobulated stupor of 2020, a year when September seems to have arrived in April and December likely won't arrive until 2021 - or 2022 for that matter. His characters, well, specifically his character - Lucy...I mean Lucia - slosh about in the roiling, frothy haze of this interminable evening out unmoored, as "time flows through [them]." At one point, late in the picture, she admits, "It's hard to say, 'No.' I was never taught that...anyways sometimes you're just caught off-guard, and the request comes, 'Can I have your number?' and the easiest way out of it is just to say, 'Yes.' And then it's more 'Yes, yes, yes'..." She's thinking of ending things.
Well, she likes him well enough. He's smart, he's kind, he's sweet. He doesn't lose his temper. Well, not exactly. But, not with her anyway. And, besides, he can keep pace with her; speak to her interests because they are his own. And, even if they aren't, he can learn and grow and adapt. And, he charmed her at the start. Back at that bowling alley. Didn't he? And, well, in any case, it's easier to say yes. Isn't it? But, she's thinking of ending things. So, she looks out the car window to create space between herself and him.
One worries, when a Kaufman picture is titled I'm Thinking of Ending Things, that the end in question is more final than a break-up of a stale relationship. That the blanket of blackness cut through by the headlights illuminating the racing snowflakes is more than just the black of night. Maybe it is. But, Kaufman's story, as expected, is a tad more complicated than such a neat and tidy solution. It's more metaphysical. More difficult to pin and place. More, in some ways, existentially horrifying. Early on, Jake anxiously pleads with Buckley to not go down into the basement. Drastic scars mark the door. The kind too big for their dog. If we know nothing of Kaufman, we sense that a spooky secret lurks in the lowermost floor of the family home. If we are devotees of the writer's work, we know that the most terrifying revelations float, ready to be exorcised, in Buckley's mind. It is both a red herring and the most important image of the film; a shut door marked by time and accident. In this film, as in all his works, Kaufman lays out his anxieties, his preoccupations. His locked doors are opened. And, what we see, now more than in any other year, feels more horrifying than ever.
