Though if you have attempted that impossibility, you’ll recognize the inappropriate jokes and awkward silences and way-too-intense laughter. You can never truly go home again, they say. Once they arrive at Jake’s childhood home, his mom and dad - god bless you, Toni Collette and David Thewlis - fret and fawn and channel the sort of fumbling stabs at connection many people associate with returning to the fold in general as an adult. ![]() (Buckley is especially deft throughout, and coming on the heels of her turns in Wild Rose and HBO’s Chernobyl, as well being the high point of the low-hanging-fruit biopic Judy, you sense that you’re seeing a performer willing to take wild swings while coming in to her own.) Which is good, because things are about to get extremely screwy. And both performers make the most of the car-as-verbal-tennis-court situation, playing off each other even when they seem to be stuck musing on their own. It’s a chance to get to know these two, as well as pick up on the actors’ respective rhythms: Buckley’s detours into goofiness before returning to a default set of wariness Plemons’ halting, hesitant attempts at filling the silence mixed with hints of buried aggression. She reluctantly agrees to recite something she wrote, which turns out to be a melancholy ode that happens to perfectly capture Jake’s mindset. He shows off about how much he knows in regards to the subject of her upcoming thesis paper. They talk of Wordsworth and long-titled poems (“you really get your words’ worth with him”), playground sets in front of abandoned houses, musical theater, movies, Mussolini, the all-purpose use of the exclamation “wow,” the weather. ![]() Still, they’re planning on venturing out to his folks’ house out in rural Oklahoma, and away they go.Īs with Reid’s book, the first act is more or less a philosophical back-and-forth that takes up 22 minutes of screen time. Either way, after a few months (or maybe it’s just been a few weeks?), the relationship seems to have run its course for her. They met at a local bar during a trivia night, or possibly she was a waitress who served him. The guy, Jake (Jesse Plemons), seems nice enough. She’s a student, majoring in quantum physics … or perhaps painting, or film theory. Waiting to be picked up by her new beau, a young woman ( Jessie Buckley) - her name might be Lucy, or Louisa, or none of the above again, it’s complicated - contemplates cutting things off. And though the film does indeed begin with a road trip, it feels very much a product of living in a world both inside and outside one’s head. I’m Thinking of Ending Things not only nudges Kaufman back in to the spotlight, it also reminds you of how much that voice has been missed. What followed for Kaufman was, beside co-directing the brilliant stop-motion-animated Anamolisa (2015) were years of stalled projects and false starts. Criminally underrated, the movie now feels eerily in tune with our tilted, construct-your-own-bubble world. ![]() An artist constructs a work that mimics real life and then goes so far down the creative rabbit hole that the work replaces real life - it’s as meta as it is metaphorical. When we got the pure, uncut Kaufman with his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York (2008), you could see the darker absurdities of his work inching toward a genuine bleakness. He had the right voice for a woozy and wobbly early-21st-century zeitgeist, he had the right directors (Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry) spiking his cerebral concepts with gonzo whimsy, and by 2005, he had an Oscar. And somehow, amidst all of the shifting perspectives and timeframes and overall blurring of lines, it also manages to move you to tears even as it leaves you bewildered and unmoored.Ī veteran of TV writers’ rooms, Kaufman established himself as a name-brand screenwriter with Being John Malkovich (1999), followed by a series of scripts over the proceeding decade that turned potentially absurd scenarios into existential, oddly emotional comedies. It uses the book’s already complicated storyline of “boy meets girl, boy takes girl to meet parents, things fall apart and the center cannot hold” to delve into deeper thoughts on memory, misery and mortality. But the scare quotes are earned, as is the overall instability - of our narrator’s reliability, of what we’re watching, of reality itself. Make that “adaptation,” and yes, we’re aware of the irony in referencing that particular word in the context of this filmmaker. ![]() “It’s good to remind yourself that the world’s larger than the inside of your own head.” The exchange - though it’s tough to call it an exchange, given that it feels like the man behind the wheel is mumbling the thought aloud to himself - happens early in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of Iain Reid’s novel, and feels like one of many breadcrumbs being dropped for viewers. “It’s why I like road trips,” a driver says to his his companion as they hustle down an icy highway.
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