I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

So it's been a while since I watched something really truly mind boggling. Something that forced me to reconsider it and turn it around in my hands like a Rubik's Cube. So I was a bit thirsty for something challenging.

And in walked I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) by Charlie Kaufman.

I. What Is It?

This is the story of a Young Woman (Jessie Buckley) who goes to visit her boyfriend's (Jesse Plemons) parents (David Thewlis and Toni Collette). There's also a side story about a school janitor (Guy Boyd). To say anything else would be giving the game away.

II. A Work of Art

I love movies that fire on all cylinders. And this one bangs.

Kaufman's script is playful, but drenched in ennui and pain. The acting, which I'll talk more of anon, is exquisite.

The art direction is incredibly detailed and lush. That scary old house is filled to the brim with wonderful wallpapers, and winding stairs, and candlelit dinners. And the colors are constantly shifting: we have bright reds and yellows that cool to purples and blues and deep puddles of black shadow. 

And it's all captured in a reduced aspect ratio of 4:3. This forced claustrophobia allows cinematographer Lukasz Zal to show and hide key elements in each scene that help underscore the sense of isolation and intensity of each scene. A great portion of the film takes place in Jake's (Plemons) car, and Kaufman and Zal find a variety of ways to shoot the scenes, allowing all of the details of that dilapidated little machine to stand out, but refusing to allow those scenes to lose their sense of vitality or animation.

Kudos also to Robert Frazen's editing. He pieces the film together in a way that evokes a kind of dreamy energy that quickly becomes a nightmare. The film could easily have felt stilted and choppy, but Frazen finds just the right moment to cut away. He stitches the film together beautifully. I cannot imagine the work that went into making this thing WORK. But it was done. Beautifully.

This movie is not a story. It is not so simple. It is a work of art that acts as a critique of memory, an assault on toxic masculinity, a shaken fist at inadequacy, and a harsh indictment of self-indulgent myth-making and legacy. I'll talk more of this below, but I would like to avoid spoilers for anyone who wants to walk into this one fresh.

III. Electric Lethargy

This movie is 134 minutes long, and features characters that talk, at length, barely above a whisper, pontificating about art and the nature of humanity, and I still couldn't look away from it. There is a kind of dynamism even in the film's most static moments: the first half hour or so (and a majority of the final act) occurs in a car traveling in a snow storm, the main characters seat-bound and otherwise immovable. Kaufman and cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, know how to cut back and forth between our two leads in such a way that keeps the static location from feeling stale and boring. And Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons make every second of it work. Buckley is an actor that turns from airy charm to navel-gazing intensity on a dime. And Plemons has made a career of playing the slightly sinister everyman whose eyes always suggest deep-rooted mechanisms of paranoia and jealousy. David Thewlis and Toni Collette are a match made in manic, over-protective, toxic parent heaven. 

Kaufman's cinematic tricks and sure hand help establish the palpable sense of dread, but the players' commitment and utter emotional bravery sell it.

IV. A "Horror" Film

Look, this movie is terrifying. There is a thick sense of dread and onrushing tragedy from the very first moments; there are scary movie tropes like a quiet car ride into a blinding storm and an old country house in the middle of nowhere. But Kaufman would never make something so provincial as a "scary movie." No. He employs a kind of dreamy visual language that has the characters, all of them, changing from scene to scene: costumes change color and are added and removed; the characters yo-yo from younger to older versions of themselves; and things appear and disappear with the snap of the fingers. This movie is existentially horrific. It made me feel trapped in it, stuck in its claustrophobic aspect ratio, along with Buckley's Young Woman. Here there are no monsters other than our own memories; other than our own unfulfilled dreams and desires. You can't run from the maggots eating your soul from in the inside out. And that's scarier than any masked maniac with a chainsaw.

V. Defiantly Opaque

Charlie Kaufman doesn't make "easy" movies. His films defy traditional storytelling norms and refuse to hold their audience's hands. This film is no different. I'm Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most daringly opaque films I've seen in some time. It demands that you engage with it, and refuses you the comfort of acknowledgement. This is a film that explodes in your lap and forces you to put the pieces back together all by yourself. And I love that.

My wife and I have been talking about it on and off all day. We talked about it before we went to bed last night. We paused the film multiple times to hash out ideas and theorize as we were watching.

V. Here's My Interpretation...

This section of the review will necessarily traipse into spoiler territory. I would like to give anyone who is keen to avoid those an opportunity to scroll right on past this part. Another thing: I have not read the book by Iain Reid, so my interpretation of this film flows solely from my understanding of the movie as key text. So don't @ me about "So and So From the Novel." 

Still here?

Great. 

Anyway, here we go: I think that the Young Woman is a ghost. Not a literal ghost. Not the soul of a departed person. She is the ghost of all of Jake's fantasies, and the shade of every rejection (real and imagined). She is equal parts memory, cherry-picked qualities from Romantic Comedy films (there is a film-within-the-film that The Janitor (Old Jake) watches on his break at work (savagely accredited to Robert Zemeckis)), and all the little things that Old Jake has fantasized about a woman being.

She is part of this fantasy he is trying to construct about his life. The hyper-intelligent (but never quite as smart as he is) poet scientist (her focus of study changes with his whims) manic pixie dream girl (impossibly out of his league) that he has invited over for the perfect meet-cute with his parents. And his parents, lord, his parents! Thewlis and Collette fawn over and belittle him with stuttering false-laughing zeal, providing a mad kaleidoscope of Jake's choking trauma. The whole film stops and starts as Jake tries to idealize and rearrange the elements of that road trip and dinner. The Young Woman's costume, which starts as bright red with yellow accents, slowly loses its lustre and eventually flat out changes colors to blues and purples, which begin to reflect Jake's color palette. This tracks the break down of the fantasy, too. She can no longer exist outside of his own mind, and so she begins to collapse into his psyche.

And all of that would be mind-blowing if Kaufman didn't find a way to subvert it even further. But he does. You see, this ghost, this amalgamated memory, seems to be fighting for some kind of agency. She is constantly talking herself out of the relationship, and then quickly reversing course and rationalizing her commitment (as if even Jake's subconscious knows that he is an undeserving creep). She begins to push at the boundaries of the fantasy, and begins to realize that her poetry (the poems that Jake requests she recite for him) and her paintings (the ones she is forced to show Jake's parents on her phone) are actually the works of real-world poets and authors. She finds books and paintings in the basement of Jake's Parents' haunted house that prove the lie. She keeps trying to assert that she needs to get back to the city, while Jake gaslights her with images of him dutifully caring for a dying mother (how can we leave my mother this way??). By the time the two find their way to Jake's old high school (and current place of employment (he's the school's janitor)), she knows she is wandering through the shattered psyche of a broken-down incel. And that's when the dream ballet starts. Yes. A dream ballet. A ballet where the idealized versions of Jake and The Young Woman float down the halls of the school in the weightless manner of fantasized things, before a janitor comes into the scene and brutally murders Jake, taking his place in the fantasy by force.

Then Jake gets to sing a musical number (from Oklahoma! (I could write thousands of words about the film's relationship to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but I'll just let that lie (see the dream ballet above))), as he accepts a Nobel Prize before an audience of his peers, past and present (all of them slathered in old-age make-up straight out of a high school play). He finally gets the recognition he deserves; the validation that he has craved his whole life. The respect he spend countless hours reading books and poetry and taking classes and watching films and painting and talking and talking and talking to earn. But it's all empty, because his fantasy woman is just that, a fantasy. Not only that, but even she tries to flee from him, constantly batting at the edges of his carefully constructed world, unable to BE REAL with him.

And if you think that this college-educated thirty-something white man, currently writing a movie review blog, felt more than a little attacked, you'd be making one helluvan understatement. This film is an assault on the kind of fragile male ego that leads men to "well-actually" their way through life, constantly asserting their own genius, and pigeon-holing themselves into the lonely existence inside their own minds; the only place where they feel accepted and understood. And I had to take a step back and consider just how close I was to this man. And it was scary. Because I was that man. When I was younger. And angrier. And my life could easily have ended up something like Jake's. And I'm super thankful that it hasn't.

TL;DR

Why You Should See It

- There is no better argument for the movie as art than this film. It doesn't play by traditional rules and stretches the medium to gorgeous limits. It is, whatever you think of its story or statements of intent, an impeccably made film.
- Buckley, Plemons, Thewlis and Collette are incredible actors. Their work in this movie is stunning and awards-worthy. Their commitment to telling this story, this experience, is legend.
- You'll be talking about it for a long time. If you dig movies to chew over with friends, this one will provide a mouthful.

- At 134 minutes, I think the film is perfectly the right length. The themes and ideas are allowed to breathe and build without hammering you over the head or overstaying their welcome. Is the film self-indulgent and pretentious? Yes, absolutely. But it is perfectly so.

Why You Shouldn't See It

- This movie is challenging. It refuses to be easy in any way. You are either game for that kind of movie or you aren't. If you aren't: stay away.

- It is incredibly depressing.

In Conclusion

I'm Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most resonant and thought-provoking films of the year. Perhaps in the last few years. Maybe even of the decade. I wrote a lot about it, and there are things in my notes that still beg to be written about and discussed. But I won't bore you with all that. Suffice to say that the film is a staggering work of art from one of America's most unique cinematic auteurs. It is a psychological horror film that grabs the current zeitgeist by the throat. Go and watch I'm Thinking of Ending Things, and come talk with me about it.

Miscellany

- Bri Larson was originally cast in the lead, but ultimately had to drop out of the project.