“I’m thinking of ending things.”
This eponymous line comes up a lot in Charlie Kaufmans’ adaptation of the novel by Iain Reid. The inner monologue of Jessie Buckley’s character, referred to by a number of names (often a variation on ‘Lucy’) none of which seem true, keeps coming back to it as she debates the pros and cons of her seven-week relationship with Jesse Plemons’ Jake. She’s meeting his parents for the first time, out on a remote farm in the middle of winter. Their relationship is full of awkward body language and stale conversation, intimations of a personal connection but nothing substantive. It’s a long drive and a long evening after that -she has plenty of occasions to broach the subject both mentally and vocally, but she can never quite follow through. She really can’t end things.
This movie is only Kaufmans’ third time in the directors’ chair, but he has built up over two decades a distinct cinematic voice through the movies he’s written, most notably Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He’s gotten more ambitious since he began directing, to good effect (Synecdoche, New York) and bad (Anomalisa), but always with the same preoccupations with existence, mortality, and the subjective nature of reality. The films he’s directed have had a tendency towards self-indulgence and nebulousness, but also an unsettling creepiness -Synecdoche began as a kind of horror movie in fact. And I’m Thinking of Ending Things is his scariest movie thus far.
It is a movie that dares you to try to make sense of it in a manner not unlike Alain Resnais’ art film classic Last Year at Marienbad. Like in that film, its’ hypnotically inconsistent reality serves two functions. One, to force you to interpret as you watch the meaning behind each anomaly, each fortuity; and two, to make you uneasy and anxious as the universe appears to be crumbling around the point-of-view character. Whatever is left to ambiguity, one thing is clear and that is that the young woman does not want to be at Jake’s parents’ farm. She’s eager to get back home and to her job in the morning. But everything from the environment (a blizzard outside) to the people around her to her own intuition seem to prevent her from reaching this objective, its’ urgency growing more the longer the film goes on. It’s utterly haunting, like an unreal, unending nightmare.
And Kaufman weaves in a lot of material to keep you questioning what’s actually going on and how reliable the young woman is. For instance, early on the idea is introduced through metaphor of thoughts being planted rather than personally grown, and sure enough, the film is dotted with such references passed off as original. On the car ride, she recites a poem she wrote that she later finds in a book at Jakes’ parents’ house (actually by Montreal poet Eva H.D.), a reference to Wordsworth seems to give her her name, the musical Oklahoma pops up all throughout the film, and in my favourite bit, a discussion on John Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence turns into the woman merely monologuing a section of Pauline Kaels’ review of the film -in a Kael impression no less (her book For Keeps also appears at an earlier point)! The woman experiences bursts of deja vu, a dog shakes off when coming indoors for just a little too long, time itself will appear to bend around her, and most notably her thoughts will every so often be intertwined with an old janitor (Guy Boyd) in some empty school, cleaning the place, loitering, or watching a curious rom-com (where the movies’ funniest gag comes from).
She appears to be the axis around which all of this spins and the grounding force of the film, as detached as she sometimes is from the most extreme elements. And Jessie Buckley plays her with an intense degree of pathos and nuance -as little as we know about her (her memories like her work are frequently inconsistent), we understand her a lot. She communicates often through voiceover, but she conveys just as much through her muted attitude. That unease in the odd behaviour of strangers, the resignation to a partners’ insistent pressures -has any actor ever captured better the discomfort of being trapped in a place adjacent to a personal argument? And her anxiety, especially in the latter parts of the movie is deeply palpable. We’ve all been frustrated by delays, and that is much of what she has to go through by the notably long third act. There’s one scene too late in the film, a recollection concerning the origin of her relationship with Jake, that is very revealing -not just in-film, but to the real life difference between a perceived meet-cute and how it actually resonates for women. It’s a performance that is truly remarkable, something to hopefully gain Buckley the international acclaim she’s already been cultivating in the U.K.
Plemons is very good too, as he raises to the challenge of the mysterious Jake -genial, intelligent, and supportive, but not terribly conscientious and a bit condescending. All through the film, Plemons perfects this vibe of unnerving impulsiveness and invisible power -the womans’ fate is always in his hands. And this becomes exceptionally intriguing in light of where the film ultimately takes this character. The cast is rounded out by David Thewlis and Toni Collette as Jake’s eccentric parents -eccentric, but not terribly unusual to anyone who’s known older farming people. Both are excellent, Thewlis as the shifty, clueless, somewhat inappropriate father, and Collette as the overbearing, bad joke-making, tinnitus-suffering mother.
There’s a reason for her tinnitus, just as there’s a reason for a woman at an ice cream store to have the same bruise as Jake, and a reason behind Jake’s story of a pig that died from an infestation of maggots. These reasons are going to be lost on most viewers, I’m not entirely sure I understand them yet myself. As for the meaning behind I’m Thinking of Ending Things, while it’s clearly exploring a host of ideas, from consciousness to originality to aging to death (a popular one for Kaufman) to the greater questions of the human condition, it doesn’t want you leaving the film with a single theme. Kaufman has taken a bunch of the ideas that he contemplates and that interest him, and has stuffed them in a blender, using the aesthetics of psychological horror and Reid’s book as a foundation (the ending to the film is different and far more surreal). And yet for its’ pretentiousness, it coalesces into something mesmerizing; and Kaufman both knows how to satiate our thirst for mystery and is self-aware enough to insert a speech directly lifted from A Beautiful Mind. He remembered that he’s funny.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is as wild as it is complex and steeped in post-modern symbolism and metaphor I’m sure only Kaufman fully comprehends. But it pairs the big ideas and loose reality with such intimate context, terrific performances, and technical brilliance (particularly from cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who composes one of the most perturbing deep focus shots near the end), that it not only warrants the multiple viewings it certainly prompts, but leaves a distinct impression on those who watch it that is unlike anything else they might experience from a movie.
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