I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
Nothing is as it seems when a woman experiencing misgivings about her new boyfriend joins him on a road trip to meet his parents at their remote farm.
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Consider her monologue on the drive home, where an unexpected reference to "A Woman Under the Influence" results in Louisa reciting Pauline Kael's critical review of the film and Gena Rowland's celebrated performance.
In the second half of the film, on the interminable trip back from his parents’ house, Jake says that he likes John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence , which the young woman essentially characterizes as a fake-feminist work of masochism, claiming that Gena Rowlands gives an exhausting tour de force, and that “nothing she does is memorable because she does so much.”
A discussion of Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence devolves into Buckley slipping invisibly into a recitation of Pauline Kael’s negative review of the film .
The Young Woman and Jake talk endlessly about Wordsworth’s poetry or John Cassavetes 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence (Buckley not only mimics Gena Rowland’s performance, she recites famed critic Pauline Kael’s dismissive review).
The two engage in epic conversations, touching on everything from William Wordsworth to the aforementioned Kael’s review of the 1974 John Cassavetes movie, “A Woman Under the Influence,” which Lucy recites from memory (it seems).
In another scene, the pair debate the quality of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, a clear spiritual cousin to I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
There is an old man janitor who appears throughout the film and reveals his true nature at the end, and then we seem to go fully into Jake’s fantasies as he imagines winning a Nobel Prize—and delivers John Nash’s acceptance speech from A Beautiful Mind—in front of an audience of young people in obvious high school theater old person makeup.
There’s a hilarious blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke about Robert Zemeckis and a delightful visual reference to “A Beautiful Mind.”
Where and how these two apparently disparate narratives converge is only made clear by the film’s finale (and even then, it’s not really certain), which goes full-blown “it was all just a dream” hallucinatory strangeness, complete with musical numbers from Oklahoma! and speeches from Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind .
Also in play are a talking pig, a snowbound ice cream shop, a speech from "A Beautiful Mind" and David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."
Alain Resnais’ time and memory fractures; dramatizations of the climactic scene of “A Beautiful Mind”; Pauline Kael’s review of John Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under The Influence”; lightly lugubrious Swedish comic director Roy Andersson’s constructed horizons, palette deracinated and dimmed, gray to green to dun; “Fight Club”; all within a ragingly boldface ET CETERA.
It will help to be familiar with the musical "Oklahoma" especially the dream ballet; with Gena Rowlands' performance in John Cassavetes's "A Woman Under the Influence" and maybe Pauline Kael's review of it; and maybe with the ending of "A Beautiful Mind."
Tonally and structurally, it reminds me a lot of mother!
Her performance in conversation with roles like Jennifer Lawrence in mother!
Una reflexión que, en su pretensión es mucho más que un compendio de citas y una mal encausada farolés teórica (cof cof te hablo Mother! ).
All four build incredible socially awkward tension not unlike Darren Aronofky’s mother!
El desconcierto recuerda también a mother!
It gave me a distinct mother!
Both are intelligent people, with knowledge ranging from an academic understanding of science, to poetry, to classic cinema (be ready to hear references to both Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence AND Forget Paris , starring Billy Crystal).
…whether Mussolini got too much credit for the trains running on time, movies ranging from “Forget Paris” to “A Woman Under the Influence,” the poems of William Wordsworth and a painting by Andrew Wyeth?
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During the return trip (with the chains on the tires), the couple’s discussions take on a tenser tone—and Kaufman makes notable, noticeable use of the sound of the car’s windshield wipers, a sidelong reference to a famous line of film criticism, from a 1951 essay by André Bazin and referring to Robert Bresson’s 1945 film “Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne”: “The sound of a windshield-wiper against a page of Diderot is all it took to turn it into Racinian dialogue.”
The conceit might remind you of the finale of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and the theme of time shifting is italicized by the fact that at one point a television is shown playing an old Mr. Peabody and Sherman cartoon.
And then there’s the ending, one which may prompt as much confusion and conversation as the conclusion of “2001: A Space Odyssey” did a half-century ago.
The surreal final half-hour — departing drastically from Reid’s book while remaining strangely faithful in spirit — defies any logical description save to say it’s a depressive’s equivalent to the stargate sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” by way of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
And I haven’t even mentioned the Dairy Queen on the Edge of the World or the high-school drive-by that ventures into “The Shining” territory (with a huge dollop of the classic musical, “Oklahoma”).
Kaufman frames certain shots like someone who loved “The Shining,” and stages a wildly creative dance number out of nowhere.
It has the trappings of a horror movie — there are nods to "The Shining" and even a creepy basement that Lucy is warned not to go down into.
One thinks of a film like R.W. Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972).
The dinner at Jake’s parents’ house might be the most awkward since the one in Eraserhead, and the film’s resonance with David Lynch movies doesn’t end there.
It’s a sequence for everybody who ever wished the chicken dinner scene in “Eraserhead” had gone on for an hour, full of ominous portents, offhanded insults and boisterous belly laughs that act as pressure release valves for an almost unbearable tension.
His mother and father, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis, are vaguely unhinged caricatures of lonely, chipper, culturally removed American parenthood; they tilt I’m Thinking Of Ending Things into a grotesque, distended sitcom farce of social discomfort, like the Eraserhead dinner-table scene kicked into a new tragicomic register.
Por eso inventaron la esperanza”, se le escucha reflexionar internamente a “Lucy”, perdón, “Louisa”, no, “Lucía” -sí, ese es su nombre-, al llegar a la finca de quienes jamás serán sus suegros -encarnados inquietantemente por Toni Collette y David Thewlis- quienes los invitan a la cena más incómoda desde que el protagonista de Eraserhead compartió la mesa con los papás de su novia.
As in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive , the horror-movie tropes of I’m Thinking of Ending Things—irrational editing, collapses in time and spatial placement, emphases on a “forbidden place” that reveals all (in this case a basement)—suggest fissures in a psyche.
There are hints of Mulholland Drive as the film treks on into surreal bits of business, such as a pair of almost-identical blondes working the counter at a Tulsey Town ice-cream stand.
Like the pleading, unanswered telephone calls that descend through Diane Selwyn’s layers of feverish denial in Mulholland Drive (2001), these voicemails hint at the unstable character of the universe in I’m Thinking of Ending Things .
If two people in a car in a snowstorm talking about the meaning of David Foster Wallace's suicide sounds like fun; if a long re-evaluation on the feminist shortcomings of John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence is similarly enticing; if you thought David Lynch was a little too obvious in Mulholland Drive – this is your movie.
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a puzzle film, in other words, and like Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” it does have a solution even if the getting there stands to leave a majority of viewers baffled, bored, or angry.
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The notion of a road trip as a springboard for a lonely intellectual’s existential crisis brings to mind Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries , and there’s quite a bit of David Lynch here too, especially as past, present, and future narrative strands merge to suggest that we are watching a character’s recollection of events, perhaps during a death rattle.
Though the bleak snowscapes are evocatively shot by Lukasz Zal (Ida), I'm Thinking of Ending Things is essentially a chamber drama in which Plemons and Buckley have long conversations covering everything from celebrated intellectuals (with quotes!) to recent Twitter debates.
These two actors, framed and lit by cinematographer Lukasz Zal (“Ida,” “Cold War”), close-ups that suggest layers of being, and so, so much Buckley moving from woozy congeniality to tipsy top of the morning to multiple intellectual streams, ticking along with a rhythm both assured and lavishly lackadaisical, so much meta on the way to meet his parents (shape-shifting David Thewlis and Toni Collette).
It's also shot in the squarish 1.33:1 aspect ratio, even getting 1.33:1 specialist ?ukasz ?al (of Ida and Cold War ) to serve as cinematographer.
During the drive out, cinematographer Lukasz Zal ( Ida , Cold War ) encloses the young woman and Jake in the car with a squared-off aspect and uses close-ups to great effect in internal scenes throughout.
Y ese colegio de pasillos largos e iluminados por el director de fotografía Luckas Zal (Ida y Cold War) puede hacer recordar a los del hotel de El resplandor.