Charlie Kaufman (2020)
This is the first time since 2002 that Charlie Kaufman has drawn on someone else’s work for a script. Like his adaptation for Adaptation, however, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by the Canadian writer Iain Reid, seems as quintessentially a Kaufman piece as any of his original screenplays. It’s the latest iteration of his by now familiar themes. The title has a double meaning. More obviously, it refers to what’s in the mind of a young woman as she and Jake, her boyfriend of several weeks, set out on a long drive to the remote farmhouse home of his parents, whom she’s to meet for the first time even though she’s already considering breaking up with their son. A plot synopsis on Wikipedia suggests that the other, deathly meaning of the title of Reid’s novel (which I’ve not read) emerges in the book’s closing stages. In the film, Kaufman’s depressive tendencies are soon giving the phrase ‘I’m thinking of ending things’ an existential heft. During their long journey on the road, through increasingly heavy snowfall, the two people in the car engage in discussion of subjects cultural and philosophical, including Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality…’ But as in Synecdoche, New York (2008), it’s mortality with which Charlie Kaufman is more concerned.
There’s very little that’s stable in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The main female character’s name changes from Lucy to Louisa to Lucia to Ames. (She’s played by Jessie Buckley so I’ll call her Jessie for simplicity.). Her clothes sometimes change, too, even though the action appears to be happening continuously, in close to real time. Whenever Jessie or Jake (Jesse Plemons) mentions her college studies, she’s doing a different subject. Whenever the talk turns to their first meeting, there’s a fresh explanation of how and where it happened. Jake’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) undergo dramatic changes in age and state of health during the younger couple’s farmhouse visit, switching from aggressively sociable fifty-somethings to senile dementia and back again. In the last part of the film – after the return car trip has got no further than Jake’s old high school, which he, then Jessie, enters – the characters’ metamorphoses are more fantastic and alarming. The only thing that stays pretty well the same across the 134 minutes of I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an atmosphere of impending doom and disintegration, expressed through Łukasz Żal’s ingenious lighting as well as Kaufman’s abundant wordage.
Early on, Jake shows an occasional, disconcerting ability to read Jessie’s thoughts. Wordsworth enters the conversation when Jake ‘hears’ her say to herself, ‘The child is father of the man’. Jessie’s a poet, too. En route to his parents’, Jake persuades her to recite one of her latest compositions, called ‘Bonedog’. In what used to be Jake’s room at the farmhouse, Jessie finds a book containing the poem, which is actually taken from a collection, Rotten Perfect Mouth, by the Toronto writer Eva HD. Jessie also paints landscapes: she’s encouraged to show images of her work, on her phone, to Jake’s parents. She later finds larger images of ‘her’ paintings elsewhere in the house. Not knowing of Eva HD, I didn’t recognise ‘Bonedog’ (and, for all I know, Jessie’s paintings may be those of a famous artist). I did recognise the words spoken by Jessie as she and Jake start their journey back, and discuss John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence: she’s quoting Pauline Kael’s review of the film verbatim. (In Jake’s room, a copy of Kael’s For Keeps is fatly conspicuous on the bookshelves – not that the Woman Under the Influence piece was included in that anthology.)
Kaufman repeatedly punctuates the couple’s drive out to the wilds with short sequences inside what’s later confirmed as Jake’s alma mater. In the car, he tells Jessie of his enthusiasm for musical theatre and reels off the names of numerous shows. He makes special reference to Oklahoma!, which he says his high school puts on every few years. We see the cast rehearsing ‘Many a New Day’ on stage, watched by an elderly janitor (Guy Boyd) who’s also shown at work around the school. In spite of the terrible weather, Jake insists, on arrival at the farm, on giving Jessie a tour of the outbuildings. This supplies an opportunity for a lament on the pointlessness of ovine existence, for a shot of pigs that have frozen to death, and for Jake to tell Jessie about another pig whose corpse was eaten away by maggots. Oklahoma!, the janitor and the dead pig story all return to dominate the final act of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
Jessie and Jake’s conversation on the way back to the city is more and more fractious, thanks to her growing anxiety that they’ll be snowbound and his disruptive whims of iron. They also disagree as to whether the lyrics of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ make it an ode to rape. Despite blizzard conditions and a huge helping of his mother’s chocolate dessert inside him, Jake is determined to stop for more sugar at a ‘Tulsey Town’ ice cream parlour. This is one of the film’s most striking sequences. Images of the parlour from outside, with a trio of girl employees seen through its windows, give the place the lonesome look and allure of an Edward Hopper picture. Two of the three girls are familiar from the high-school Oklahoma! rehearsals, where they played Laurey (Hadley Robinson) and Aunt Eller (Gus Birney). In the ice cream parlour, they’re unhelpful, giggling scornfully at their gauchely obliging co-worker (Abby Quinn). The sympathetic exchange between Jessie and this last girl is a rare engaging moment, and not just because, while it lasts, the sinister pall is briefly lifted. The encounter starts to hint, too, at the mystery of a human being’s ability to imagine the unknown life of another human being, fleetingly met.
Charlie Kaufman is as keen as ever to confirm how well read he is, combining with this an oddly naïve conviction that his insights must be original. (Synecdoche, New York sometimes gave the impression that he thought he’d discovered paralysing fear of time and death.) In an interview with Jonathan Romney for Sight & Sound (October 2020), Kaufman says of Oklahoma!:
‘The character of Judd [sic], who also appears in my movie, is a really damaged, dark, scary, tragic person. You think of Oklahoma! and people singing and dancing dressed as cowboys, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on there.’
Perhaps Kaufman had never seen Fred Zinnemann’s film version of Oklahoma! Many people who have will already have been struck by the incongruous but unignorable weight in the story of malign, disturbed Jud Fry (memorably played by Rod Steiger). Needless to say, ‘Many a New Day’’s perky resilience isn’t typical of the selection of Oklahoma! elements in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. (You wouldn’t expect Kaufman to reiterate Aunt Eller’s injunction that ‘You gotta be hearty’.) In the high-school climax, once Jessie finds Jake, they become spectators of a reworking of the Oklahoma! dream ballet. Figures dressed exactly like themselves play Laurey (Unity Phelan) and Curly (Ryan Laughtner Steele). The knife-wielding Jud is now a version of the school janitor (Frederick E Wodin), who kills the Jake figure.
This is the last seen of Jake and Jessie until the closing sequence, in which they’re both old people in deliberately unconvincing ageing make-up. On the stage of the school auditorium, Jake receives a Nobel Prize and delivers the acceptance speech that John Nash gives at the end of A Beautiful Mind. The significance of this isn’t clear, beyond the fact that Charlie Kaufman probably doesn’t think much of Ron Howard’s film. Jake then sings a song, ‘Lonesome Room’, a solo for Jud in the stage show of Oklahoma! (omitted from the Zinnemann film). In the audience, Jessie leads the standing ovation. In the meantime, the elderly janitor has had the film nearly to himself. At the end of his shift, he sits in his car outside the school and begins to hallucinate (Jake’s parents, a cartoon Tulsey Town jingle). He undresses and goes back into the school, led by another hallucination – a speaking pig. The animal’s and the overweight janitor’s naked flesh looks consubstantial. The difference between them, a small mercy, is that only the animated pig’s body is maggot-infested.
In Synecdoche, New York, the protagonist, Caden Cotard, attempts to recreate as a piece of theatre the entirety of his life, a project ever-expanding and increasingly uncontrollable. As you watched the film, you sometimes wondered if Charlie Kaufman was painting himself into a similar corner but Synecdoche, for all its digressions, was held together by Caden’s persisting hang-ups about illness and annihilation. The differently ambitious Anomalisa (2015) was coherent, too – ditto the plot of Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, according to the Wikipedia synopsis. The same can’t be said for this film of the book, which Kaufman struggles to shape and resolve. (Most of his divergences from Reid’s plot seem to be in the closing stages.) Besides, the abandon-all-hope-of-human-happiness theme doesn’t work as effectively here. Since it doesn’t obviously express the state of mind of either leading character it’s more obviously imposed by Kaufman. The connection between the futurelessness of Jake and Jessie’s relationship and the futility of existence generally feels forced. Although there’s strong acting all round, the main pleasure comes less from any of the performances than from seeing Jesse Plemons get an overdue leading role.
It’s clear from what he says in the Sight & Sound interview that Kaufman makes films to explore ideas that interest him more than engaging with his audience does. When (‘laughing’) he tells Jonathan Romney, ‘That’s always my goal, to put people off’, he can only be half-joking. Charlie Kaufman is well aware not only of what he’s doing but also of the viewer reactions it’s liable to trigger. So you disparage a film of his feeling he probably knew that’s what you were going to say. My increasing problem with his work is that I think I know what Kaufman’s going to say, too – the same things he said last time.
3 November 2020
