Photo credit: Anna Hanks
Writer and director Charlie Kaufman
Charlie Kaufman has never been shy when it comes to confounding audiences. The screenwriter behind such tricky films as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation is writer and director of a new film streaming on Netflix, I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Come prepared for a narrative closer to the universe of quantum physics than the reasonable Newtonian order of everyday reality.
If the film’s title suggests suicidal depression, the impression seems born out in the opening scene. Heard is the dejected voice of a young woman called (unless my ears deceived me) Lucy, Louisa and Lucia at different moments of the script. Identity itself is governed by the uncertainty principle. At any rate, as cameras circulate through an empty house (which we’ll visit later), Lucy (as we’ll call her for convenience) ponders an unnamed problem that “doesn’t go away” and “is there when I sleep… and when I wake up.”
Depressed? Lucy (Jessie Buckley) is uncomfortable with the visit to his parents planned by her new boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons). They travel across a heartland of bleak, heartbroken beauty as snow flurries gather into a blizzard. Long stretches are spent staring at the road ahead through the restricted field of vision left by the continuous whoosh-whop of the windshield wipers. Conversation is patchy for many miles but gradually begins to flow. She recites her recently written, depressing poem (“coming home is terribly lonely”) as they drive toward the home where he grew up.
“Wow,” he says, and she points out that “wow” has devolved into an all-purpose exclamation signifying nothing. No, he insists, “It’s like you wrote it about me.”
Many would feel hurt as the subject of such morose verse but talk turns elsewhere. She remarks (per Kaufman’s interest in breaking cinematic conventions), “Crappy movie ideas grow in your brain,” displacing better ideas. “That’s what makes them dangerous,” she insists. And they talk of time, which she describes as a moving train from which jumping is dangerous. Mordant thoughts?
Jake’s parents’ farm is covered in snow as he gives her “the abridged tour.” As barndoors creak in the moaning wind (wind is an audio motif throughout the film), she contemplates the miserable lives of the sheep who stare back at her. Jake remarks, “Life isn’t always pretty on a farm” and describes the miserable death of the pigs who were once penned in the barn.
The parents’ house includes oddly discomfiting details (all those scratch marks on the cellar door) as well as the odd pair who call it home. In one of the most awkward dinner scenes since Eraserhead (David Lynch must be a kindred spirit), Lucy warily eyes the ham after mom (Toni Collette) declares that their meal was raised entirely on the farm. Dad (David Thewlis) criticizes Lucy’s emotionally bleak landscape paintings displayed on her phone while mom eagerly praises their dark palette. The parents smile and babble like unhinged automatons and say the strangest things. Jake is clearly uncomfortable, and his unease inflects Lucy, who at one point begins to sound like his mom. Later, she remarks that “most people are other people,” their lives a set of quotation marks in an unconscious mimicry of their surroundings.
And then it gets weirder and weirder as the parents age horribly and grow younger again. Time in Jake’s childhood home collapses like a black hole; events separated by years become more or less coexistent. Lucy finds her poem from the car ride in an open book in Jake’s old bedroom.
Oh, I’m Thinking of Ending Things has a side story concerning an elderly high school janitor and the school’s production of Oklahoma! Improbably, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Many a New Day” purrs on the car radio during Lucy and Jake’s middle-of-nowhere journey to his parents. At breaktime in the cafeteria, the janitor watches a Hollywood movie that mirrors aspects of Lucy and Jake. As if in synchronicity, the side story and he main plot eventually converge…
So what to make of a film whose screenplay mocks the normal progression of time while quoting Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde and—at length—Pauline Kael? The main characters are brought to life through emotionally demanding performances—in modes that run quickly from apprehension to giddiness, satisfaction and mortification through Alzheimer’s-induced memory loss—as they navigate a riddle without a solution. Maybe our reality is really like that, a puzzle with most of the pieces missing?
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