Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is simultaneously specific and profoundly universal; a beguiling dissection of relationships and family in time.
The set-up is simple. A young woman (Jessie Buckley) begrudgingly agrees to take a long road trip through a blizzard with her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to his family home to meet his parents for the first time. Along the way, Kaufman and his committed players (including Toni Collette and David Thewlis) use this scenario to interrogate burdening a prospective long term partner with the reality of the weird ass people who brought you into this world.
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” resonates because it’s able to consistently remind you that you’re watching a film, and then seconds later disarm you with a heartbreaking sentiment. Kaufman, the magnificent mind behind such affecting and original films as “Adaptation”, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich” (to name a few) adapts Iain Reid’s novel and directs
It’s not a novel I’ve read or heard of before seeing the film, but one can see the appeal of the text in – at a minimum – the way it lends itself to audience misdirection and manipulation. It’s difficult to articulate the mechanisms of Kaufman’s approach in the storytelling without some minor spoilers, but I’ll avoid those that relate to conclusions of the film.
Like Xavier Dolan’s “Mommy” and Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse”, Kaufman confines the audience to a 4:3 claustrophobic world view. This stylistic choice is as much about focus as it is about the way that Jake (Plemons) views the world. Jake confesses on the car ride that he’s maybe spent too much time watching movies; so relatable – especially amid this pandemic – that it hurts.
There’s a divine strangeness to Kaufman’s impressions of time. It feels as if you’re experiencing every agonising and awkward second of the interaction. The car ride conversations, the dinner anecdotes about relationship ‘meet-cute’ moments leave all the stilted, uncomfortable and boring bits in.
Sometimes it’s a relief to recognise the imperfections of real-life. The whole experience rejects the lie that rom-coms have propagated and conveyed the experience in all its frightening, bizarre and downright awkwardness. Thoughts as narration, feel like they’ve got the volume turned up. Laced in the background are clues to what’s “really” happening; which is either a bonus or a distraction.
Jesse Plemons continues to grow in my conception as a performer that finds a way to humanise every single character he portrays in every film. If you’re not paying attention in some of his smaller roles, it was easy to dismiss the work. As Jake, you get to focus on the ways he expresses this richly nuanced, frustrated, insular character. And in the moments where Kaufman calls on Plemons to go to extremes, he finds a way to make it feel you’re discovering a meal ablaze in the oven.
Jessie Buckley is really something. From the outset of the film, she’s burdened with fulfilling this expected relationship function. Sometimes you’re sure that people around her can almost overhear her inner monologue. During this extensive, slipperily expressed portrayal of a drive and a meal she represents the multiple personas she’s cornered into effortlessly. She pivots effortlessly. Toni Collette and David Thewlis interact as characters in a kind of age metamorphosis – and they’re both so blissfully at home with strangeness.
A tell for Kaufman’s voice is in the ways that he pokes fun at other filmmakers and finds a way to engage with film criticism as part of the construct of the movie. At one moment in the film, Plemons’ Jake mentions John Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under The Influence” and Buckley channels Pauline Kael’s review of the film and begins to perform it as a counterpoint verbatim. In their exchange, the “idiot symbolism” is eviscerated in that inimitable Kael way.
In Kaufman’s recent novel “Antkind” and now in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” he’s expressing a complicated relationship with critics. In my experience of the film, the (sometimes) distracting affectation and personality of Kaufman bleeds through Iain Reid’s original text rather than an outright attempt to coerce the discourse into virtual fisticuffs between filmmaker and critic. Here it’s more akin to what Paul Bettany’s Chaucer did in the punk-rock medieval candy of “A Knight’s Tale.” He is allowed to “eviscerate [his critics] in fiction. Every pimple, every character flaw… [they] will be naked for eternity.”
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” shows the short circuit of a defining relationship – the frustrating repetition, the cycle that needs to be battled and defeated.