I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Charlie Kaufman) (Patreon)

58/100

Massive spoilers.

The first Kaufman-penned film that strikes me as being much better directed than it is written. Not too surprising, perhaps, since this is as close as he's yet come to faithfully adapting another writer's work; I haven't read Reid's novel, but most of my issues with the movie (including, well, the basic premise) can evidently be traced back to it, while the aspects I like seem to be largely Kaufman's invention. With rare exceptions, revealing a major character to be imaginary doesn't work for me—I don't even much like Fight Club anymore, precisely for that reason. This is a particularly egregious example in that it's the ostensible protagonist who's a carefully constructed fiction, though I guess I give Kaufman (and especially Buckley, who's amazing) some credit for making this fairly obvious by around the time that Lucy/Louisa/Lucia/Ames tells Jake's parents the story of how she and Jake met, transforming into a radically different personality type in the process. I guessed shortly thereafter that everything we see constitutes Jake's projection, and that the "random" old janitor must be Jake's current incarnation. Trouble is, the movie has precious little to offer once you've tumbled to that, merely digging deeper and deeper into this pathetic dude's collection of references. Kaufman wisely avoids explaining everything at the end, as the book evidently does, and it's possible that the dream ballet and closing song might have worked better for me had I understood that both are lifted from Oklahoma!, the rare classic Broadway musical that I've still never seen in any form. (I also failed to recognize the Beautiful Mind parody, despite having seen that film twice.) At a certain point, though, it started to feel as if I were just waiting for the Big Reveal, and being denied an explicit answer key doesn’t retroactively alleviate the sensation of wheels forever spinning in the muck of faux erudition. Plus I really kinda can't believe that Kaufman actually made what's basically The 4.  

But! For the first time, I'm legitimately excited about Charlie Kaufman, Burgeoning Formalist. Much of this film (including a 22-minute stretch at the outset) consists of two people talking in a moving car, which is notoriously difficult to make visually interesting; Kaufman's coverage of these conversations is so dynamic and evocative that I sometimes had to force myself to listen as well as look. (Editor Robert Frazen probably deserves some credit, too, though his résumé—stuff like The Founder, Enough Said, Smokin' Aces, etc.—doesn't suggest a cutter extraordinaire. Oh, and the sound team, constantly shifting from interior to exterior and back again, dialogue abruptly muffled, subordinate to the sound of wind. And whoever was responsible for simulating snowy weather conditions outside the windows. A real collaborative effort.) Likewise, the staging at Jake's childhood home fairly wowed me, above and beyond all the time jumps and other foreground weirdness. The first time that everyone except the young woman mysteriously vanishes, Kaufman shoots her sitting at the table from a very precise overhead angle that makes it unclear whether Jake and his parents are physically absent or just not quite visible in the frame, which is dead-on perfect. So while I sometimes got exasperated by Thinking's thinking—never more so, I think, than when Kaufman and/or Reid decides it’s time to relitigate "Baby, It’s Cold Outside," which yeah okay might legitimately be something a Jake type would carry around in his head for years but still jesus christ not again—the film's forbidding elegance makes me fervently hope that people continue financing this guy's nutty experiments.