How strange it must be to see the world through the eyes of Charlie Kaufman. I imagine he was an only child to a couple working but absent parents, leaving him to his own imagination and devices. After becoming enamored with his own imagination, Kaufman had no need for friends or anything, and just pushed deeper and deeper into his own mind, filtering normal interactions through his manifestation of what others minds are doing. Each time some life event happens, Kaufman enters his own mind’s playhouse to come up with the brain’s manifestation of those experiences; in I’m Thinking of Ending Things’s case, that means a Charlie Kaufman romantic relationship enactment. Whoa…
In this case, we enter a car with a young woman (Jessie Buckley) and her new boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons). The woman is sort of excited, sort of not, to be meeting Jake’s parents (David Thewlis and Toni Collette). On the drive and through dinner, we hear her inner monologue as she converses with Jake and then with the whole family at dinner.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things was never going to be Dr. Strange. So without Marvel’s budget, how does Charlie Kaufman show everyone that this movie is mostly internal monologue? That’s where the editing department deserves all the praise in the world. We start out with some voiceover from Jessie Buckley, to ease the audience into the mind in a normal, movie way. Then the editing department starts adding in scenes that don’t quite fit into the narrative of the story that are easy to suss out, like repeats of exact scenes we’d just seen. Now that the audience’s mind is prepped for something different, and after the family dinner, the editing team dials it up. By the end of the next 30 minutes, the movie has you feel like your inside of someone’s brain, experiencing a living, breathing, memory. More recent Charlie Kaufman films aim for specifically that sensation (Synechdoche, New York being an example). As a viewer, this means you sorta stop watching the film and what’s going on, and just start trying to figure out what the movie is trying to say. Though it emotionally loses you a bit, the movie will endure because it breeds endless speculation and debate as to what is really going on, a testament to how well the editor’s have turned a story into a manifestation of human thought, amazing.
Also helping is the strong cast, clearly game for the difficulty of participating in a Charlie Kaufman story. Jessie Buckley continues her ascent into superstardom, donning a decent Midwest accent and playing our gateway into the story. Though there are bound to be other interpretations, Buckley’s performance made me think the story is from her perspective, and makes sure the audience is emotionally invested in the story despite how disengaging the editing can make it. Jesse Plemons has also seen his star steadily rise; here he does a wonderful job playing an enigma of a man, being manipulated scene to scene by the woman’s filter on the memory. Plemons has to wildly swing between boring, sweet, angry, perturbed, funny, erudite, and many other personality traits, scene to scene, which he succeeds in doing brilliantly. In small parts, Toni Collette and David Thewlis inject a necessary fun exciting energy into the story, which immediately engages the audience and makes you lean a little closer to the screen when they’re on it.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is movie reviewer catnip. There will be thinkpieces aplenty about what the movie means, what it’s trying to do, or if it is the link between Fargo’s seasons (Plemons, Thewlis, and Buckley are all stars in different seasons, crazy right?). For me, it’s part of a wonderful resume of films that will get Charlie Kaufman an honorary Oscar for writing and a PhD for Psychology somewhere. Not that he cares, he’ll just be thinking about how his mind is reacting to the news and ready to make that his next feature.