(These are the people who read all of “Finnegan’s Wake” in college.) But what strikes me is that having gotten that movie out of his system, Kaufman has done very little since. For some of us, it was borderline unwatchable for a small cult, it’s some kind of masterpiece. Kaufman took four more years to produce his next film (his first as a director), the postmodern head-scratcher “Synecdoche, New York,” which expressed the side of Charlie Kaufman that saw life as a crossword puzzle that could never be solved. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004) was his magnum opus, and it was a thing of beauty - though one heard stories about how the film’s director, Michel Gondry, treated Kaufman’s script as an overgrown forest that had to be pruned into something shapelier. Starting in 1999, with “Being John Malkovich,” what a run he had! For about five years, Charlie Kaufman could do no wrong, and that’s because his movies, even when they weren’t perfect, had an unruly metastasizing life that seemed to fuse with the synapses in your own brain. His films had more complex excitement, and more of a light-and-dark tingle, 15 years ago. We want honesty from a Charlie Kaufman movie, but “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which is based on Iain Reid’s 2016 psychological horror novel, is a bad-news “Twilight Zone” episode that isn’t telling difficult truths it’s just a Debbie Downer dud. But he seems trapped in the blinkered point-of-view of a socially arrested high-school loser. Kaufman seems to be saying that love is an illusion and that people, if they’re true to who they are, have no possibility of connecting. But “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” suggests a joyless couple out of a mediocre Woody Allen film crossed with “Barton Fink.” It’s not just a quirky, morose downer of a movie - it’s didactically morose. Going into a new Charlie Kaufman film, our own hopes as moviegoers are always raised, because at his best he’s a wizard of the imagination, and a uniquely grounded anti-romantic romantic. That’s because Kaufman is now treating hopelessness as the ultimate signifier of integrity. There isn’t a spark of faith or good feeling in sight. But in the place where Kaufman is now working from, he has so dichotomized that conflict - between the fake and the real, between bogus Hollywood uplift and the terrible “truth” of what life is - that he’s presenting the audience with a film that’s an homage to hopelessness. Okay, fine that’s what any adventurous filmmaker does. And what Charlie Kaufman reveals in that line is that he sees himself engaged in a war against fake, crappy movie ideas, a war that he’s fighting with real ideas. They might talk about movies, but not about “movie ideas,” and certainly not about crappy movie ideas replacing real ideas that’s the way a screenwriter thinks. That line is a tell, because no ordinary person would say it.
“Like, they grow in your brain, replacing real ideas. “Even fake, crappy movie ideas want to live,” she says. Buckley’s character, having acknowledged her attraction to ending things, tells Jake that she actually thinks everything on earth wants to live. But then comes one of those lines of dialogue that reveals, almost inadvertently, where a filmmaker is coming from. And a movie about them is destined to be a kind of death dance, too. What they have isn’t a relationship - it’s a slow-motion death dance. Listening to these two, we can see what the problem is: They’re depressives who don’t spark each other. When Buckley tells us that she can’t imagine the relationship lasting, we nod our heads, thinking: It’s hard to see, actually, how it ever lasted past one or two blah dates. At his behest, the two discuss Wordsworth, Mussolini, the musical “Oklahoma!” and suicide bombers, but mostly they seem to be acting out their mutual sense of muffled despair.
IM THINKING OF ENDING THINGS REVIEWS CRACKED
But Jake, who sounds like he’s never cracked a joke in his life, is a painfully staid and passive fellow with a dry, droning voice and a way of showing off his arcane knowledge of things that can bring any conversation to a standstill. Buckley’s young woman is no happy camper, but with her fast-break grin, her blithe putdowns, and her aureole of reddish curls, she has a cynical urban vivacity. Should she be ending that?ĭuring the car ride, we see why that question might be hanging in the balance. But the words also apply to the relationship she’s in. The first words we hear, in voiceover, are Buckley confessing “I’m thinking of ending things,” and she then describes what could be a suicidal tendency. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” the new movie written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, opens with an extended road-trip sequence in which a young woman ( Jessie Buckley) - she’s identified in the credits simply as the Young Woman - drives through a country snowstorm with Jake ( Jesse Plemons), her boyfriend of six weeks, to meet his parents at their Oklahoma farmhouse.
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