His halting attempts at relaxed banter carry quiet pangs of desperation, her responses alternately polite and closed-off. Jake seems to have an idealized notion of her. The couple are on their first road trip, and the young woman (let’s call her Lucy for the sake of simplicity) is already regretting “the proverbial next step” of agreeing to meet Jake’s parents when she sees no future in their relationship. The unspoken impulse takes on such palpable shape that her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons), sitting beside her in the driver’s seat, picks up on it as if she said it out loud. Or as Łukasz Żal’s camera slowly steers its mournful gaze around the empty rooms and hallways of the house that is her destination, taking in its sad hodgepodge of floral wallpapers and chintzy décor, the suggestion takes root that the thought has been loitering for some time, perhaps not even hatched but planted there fully-formed. The grim thought that provides the title of both the novel and the film lurches into the head of Buckley’s character in the opening moments. Yet in many fundamental ways, the movie is frustrating it’s frequently a hard slog, as distancing as it is illuminating. On many levels it’s a bold, brilliant work, uncompromising in its darkness and distinguished by rigorously committed performances from a superb principal cast. It’s a tough watch, broken down into four acts punctuated by long static stretches of dialogue exchanged in the claustrophobic setting of a car traveling lonely roads under heavy snowfall. But its long stretches of nonlinear philosophical rumination, its enigmatic allusions to a mostly unspecified tragedy, and the contextual void in which the action takes place make it largely resistant to the standard structural dynamics of cinematic narrative.ĭigging into his trademark toolbox with more concern for honoring the material than making life easy for his audience, Kaufman has probably made as complex and audaciously loopy a film as admirers of Reid’s novel could have desired. Its baseline narrative is straightforward enough - a young man takes his relatively new girlfriend to meet his parents at the remote farmhouse where he grew up. The seemingly impossible-to-adapt source material is categorized as a literary thriller. Tackling Canadian author Iain Reid’s 2016 debut novel, Kaufman set himself another challenge that would defeat most screenwriters. In his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Spike Jonze’s 2002 film, Adaptation, Kaufman turned his struggles to whittle a script out of the nonfiction Susan Orlean book The Orchid Thief into a dizzying meta-plunge into the creative process. It sinks its claws in early on and never retracts them. That invention of hope surfaces intermittently - in fragments of forced cheer and embattled optimism, glimmers of happier times past or imagined futures, in a corny ice-cream jingle or even a rapturous dream ballet lifted from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (The intoxicating score by Jay Wadley ingeniously riffs on 1950s advertising and lush romantic musicals in those latter cases.) But the underlying melancholy is pervasive. “Other animals live in the present, humans cannot, so they invented hope,” says the female protagonist played with gnawing dread by Jessie Buckley, first identified as Lucy and then by several other names throughout. But his third feature as writer-director, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, is by far his bleakest, so steeped in suffocating anxiety it should come with a mental health advisory. Even when dealing with depression, despair and mortality, Kaufman’s more playful instincts have tended to ameliorate his obsessively cerebral side. His films are teasing puzzles marked by surreal detours and jarring rips in the fabric of reality. For more than two decades now, Charlie Kaufman has been examining the tricky wiring of the human mind in an eclectic yet tightly cohesive body of screen work ranging across several lauded screenplays and three more he directed himself.
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