![]() ![]() ![]() Image from I’m Thinking of Ending Things, courtesy Netflix And meanwhile we realize, through synchronicities and crossovers in the film’s edits and soundtrack, that Jake and the Buckley woman’s journey is occurring within the mental landscape of that older character, a janitor working at a typical American-movie-high-school who’s presumably conjuring these protagonists up from some combination of his memories and his fantasies. Across the 20-minute road-trip scene that follows-during which Kaufman indulges in jittery cuts separating fairly straightforward angles looking at the car, the first two characters (both apart and together), and out the window-we find they’re going to visit Jake’s parents. So I’m going to describe what goes on, pretty clearly, and we’ll go from there.Ī woman (Jesse Buckley), first seen cavorting in a hollowed-out town beset by horizontal snowfall, is picked up by her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons), while intercut shots depict an older man getting ready in a room somewhere (the fourth note I took was, is that Jake watching himself? ). And I say pointless because that’s how Kaufman treats them: The narrative secrets ostensibly being hidden from the audience-the source novel was lauded in part for its twist ending-are revealed pretty clearly within the first 20 minutes. Unlike the deadpan of Kaufman’s prior directorial work- Synecdoche, New York (2008), a genuinely disturbing absurdist drama, and Anomalisa (2015), a very funny but almost parodically-simple comedy- I’m Thinking of Ending Things is predicated on rather pointless obfuscations. And in the case of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, it’s often the work of other artists taking up that space. One of the many texts cited in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman’s film adaptation of the 2016 novel by Iain Reid, is the David Foster Wallace collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997), which contains within it a report from the set of Lost Highway (1997) titled “David Lynch Keeps His Head.” In that piece, Wallace quotes the critic Pauline Kael, who’s present in the Kaufman film too I’m Thinking of Ending Things lifts her review of A Woman Under the Influence (1976), while Wallace reproduces lines from her piece on Blue Velvet (1986), where she wrote, “If you feel that there’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche, it may be because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition.” Kaufman’s films, inhibited at every turn, place a great deal of art between you and his psyche. Written for the screen and directed by Charlie Kaufman. Image from I’m Thinking of Ending Things, courtesy Netflix Film Review : I’m Thinking of Ending Things
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