I'm Thinking of Ending Things - 2020
This review may contain spoilers.
The only thing I've learned to trust in a Charlie Kaufman film is the man himself. Buildings are never really just buildings, artifices of wood and metal and stone. People could be people. But then again, they could be projections of a solipsistic mind. Or, I don't know, energies from the astral plane. Nothing is what it seems, and yet we never waver in our confidence we're in able hands. We believe in the vision of our auteur, that his adaptation of some literary work or other will not only be uniquely profound (and quite unlike the work its cribbing from, I might add) but TRANSFORMATIVE. Disoriented by the visual chaos, even as strands of familiar themes emerge (loneliness, solitude, the ubiquity of death), we embrace his works for what they inevitably will be - an icy, soul-plumbing ride.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things is no different in this regard. One of my favorite happenings in a film is where I'm around 10 minutes in, and I get the distinct sense that the writer is just smarter than me. His writing is crowded with specificities pushing at universal truths. His lines seemingly tossed off and conversational, but pregnant with deeper meaning. Kaufman is such a hyper-literate writer, his interests always find a way into his works. In this case, it's Pauline Kael and John Cassavettes, the poetry of Eva H.D., the artwork of Ralph Albert Blakelock, and of course the musical Oklahoma!.
But these works are weapons of oration. They are ammunition in an arsenal of thoughts and statements about the nature of the world, placed into the mouths of his characters. See, the film's conceit is simple enough. A newly dating couple heads off to the country to "meet the boyfriend's family." What could be convoluted about that? Well, we can start with the humorous irony that this experience can actually be rather terrifying for a woman. The questions come readily to mind: What will they be like? Will they accept me? Am I good enough for their son? and so many more. Yet, our narrator is concerned with something quite different, an implicit question phrased as a statement - I'm thinking of ending things. The query of course is...should I?
So, at last we've got ourselves a lay up, right friends? A relationship drama that's part road trip, part family dinner and the like. Well, no, because this is a somber piece of mood art. The couple argues in the car, even as they flirt and act coy. The score is consistently dour, and the weather is just an unending blizzard of dimlit gray and expansive white. Things get no better once they arrive at the dinner. Shot perspectives keep changing, the female lead’s outfits do as well.
Then time starts shifting on us, as the parents (played masterfully by Toni Collette and quite impressively by David Thewlis) first age and then grow younger and back again. And the plot line keeps intercutting with these shots of an old janitor mopping up the halls of a high school and watching musical rehearsals. Jake (the young man) and Lucy, Lucia, Louisa (for her name keeps changing) begin to meld as well. A picture of Jake on the wall looks an awful lot like one would imagine the young lady appeared as a child (she mistakes it for herself). The photographs she shows Jake's confused parents are seen in the basement as the work of Blakelock and are ascribed to Jake. On the way back she even recites a Pauline Kael review verbatim, with the particular affectation of the critic and a cigarette in mouth appearing apparently out of thin air.
I could go on and on. The point is, things aren't what they seem. But, as I've stated, the mastery of Kaufman is that he has such a keen eye. He has paid attention to each and every detail, creating not just a puzzle box, but a series of nested pieces. The film is so layered, it would greatly reward the viewer on multiple sittings. Yet, it's coherent enough in all of its cacophony to deliver its message resoundingly on first sitting. (You just might have to do a little hard musing afterwards).
All of Kaufman's works are in some ways about solipsism, obsessions with the self. Because of Kaufman's cynical and morose artistic bent, all involve loneliness. The preoccupation with death. The search for meaning and connections between life and art. Because he spends so much time having his characters quote other material, the question could be raised - How original are these peoples' worldviews? Or better yet, how much of any of our beliefs are really our own? Perhaps the most common criticism of the man as a whole, and I think the most valid, is this sort of self-adulation in erudite sulkiness. The idea of quoting others ad nauseum to sound smart, and to create critical distance from your own thoughts. The danger is in saying SO much so pedantically you actually say very little.
I am not sure that ITOET escapes this entirely, but I do feel it reaches powerful conclusions in the third act, even if they are utterly bleak and nihilistic. As we begin to suspect about 30 minutes in, this is one of those "it's all in his head" pictures. The janitor's tale then moves front and center. The girl is a projection of the girl he never "got," Jake an idealized version of his younger self. What we have is a man who read a ton of books (Pauline Kael is on his shelf), saw a ton of art, and watched a bunch of films. But he never found companionship. He never shook the loneliness that plagued him. He imagined himself a witty confident man, who found a strong, sharp feminist girl at a bar on trivia night (this plot strand recurs in a shifting fashion, even as a fake Zemeckis film the old man watches on the tube) and brought her home to mom and dad. In actuality, she likely remembers him no more than a mosquito bite she got 40 years ago.
The tonal shifts keep coming because the girl is inconstant (and the man is moving towards his cold end). When she's brilliant and demure, he's full of adulation. When she challenges his superior intellect, he becomes disoriented and irascible. Soon, it becomes obvious that the titular clause was not about ending a relationship but suicide itself. As the old man begins to break down, the pig filled with maggots from the first act returns in animated form. He advises a stoic acceptance of humanity's fate, a recognition that all things die and, hey, somebody has to be unimportant and discarded.
A quote from the film is illustrative as death comes into focus: "People like to think of themselves as points moving through time. But I think it's probably the opposite. We're stationary, and time passes through us, blowing like cold wind, stealing our heat, leaving us chapped and frozen." This is all that has taken place in that old farmhouse, and the series of visions moving through memory and time. It's, in essence, the plot of the film. It is also an ingenious bit of foreshadowing.
But, before he "goes out," the man summons one last vision of grander in homage to his favorite musical. First a dream ballet sequence between Jake and the girl which is magically whimsical, but comes back to reality when the dancing janitor enters the frame and extinguishes the Jake-ian light. Then, as a makeup-aged Jake delivers an acceptance speech for his powerful life's work (in front of all his also-aged bevy of mental characters), he soon settles into a rousing rendition of Oklahoma's "Lonely Room". The message is clear: Jake is the janitor who is Jud from the musical. The lonely man always on the outside looking in, longing for connection but falling on his own knife instead. As his own light is extinguished, all of the frozen landscapes and blizzard conditions come sharply into focus. And perhaps, as the sun dawns for the first time over the school, there is peaceful rest in release. Oh yeah, and give Jessie Buckley and Lukasz Zal ALL THE AWARDS.
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