• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • HOME
  • NEWS+OPINIONS
    • NEWS TO US
    • COLUMNS
      • APPARENT HORIZON
      • DEAR READER
      • Close
    • LONGFORM FEATURES
    • OPINIONS
    • EDITORIAL
    • Close
  • ARTS+ENTERTAINMENT
    • FILM
    • MUSIC
    • COMEDY
    • PERFORMING ARTS
    • VISUAL ARTS
    • Close
  • DINING+DRINKING
    • EATS
    • SIPS
    • Close
  • LIFESTYLE
    • CANNABIS
      • TALKING JOINTS MEMO
      • Close
    • WELLNESS
    • GTFO
    • Close
  • STUFF TO DO
  • TICKETS
  • ABOUT US
    • 5 DOUBLE-U’S
    • MASTHEAD
    • DISTRIBUTION
    • ADVERTISE
    • SUBMISSIONS
    • PRIVACY POLICY
    • Close
  • BECOME A MEMBER

Dig Bos

The Dig - Boston's Only Newspaper

CURRENT STREET EDITION

DIG 23.02 – 1/28/21

FILM REVIEW: “I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS”

Written by JAKE MULLIGAN Posted September 11, 2020 Filed Under: A+E, Film

Image from I’m Thinking of Ending Things, courtesy Netflix

Film Review: I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Written for the screen and directed by Charlie Kaufman. US, 2020, 134 minutes.
Available on Netflix.

One of the many texts cited in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman’s film adaptation of the 2016 novel by Iain Reid, is the David Foster Wallace collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997), which contains within it a report from the set of Lost Highway (1997) titled “David Lynch Keeps His Head.” In that piece, Wallace quotes the critic Pauline Kael, who’s present in the Kaufman film too; I’m Thinking of Ending Things lifts her review of A Woman Under the Influence (1976), while Wallace reproduces lines from her piece on Blue Velvet (1986), where she wrote, “If you feel that there’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche, it may be because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition.” Kaufman’s films, inhibited at every turn, place a great deal of art between you and his psyche. And in the case of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, it’s often the work of other artists taking up that space.

Unlike the deadpan of Kaufman’s prior directorial work—Synecdoche, New York (2008), a genuinely disturbing absurdist drama, and Anomalisa (2015), a very funny but almost parodically-simple comedy—I’m Thinking of Ending Things is predicated on rather pointless obfuscations. And I say pointless because that’s how Kaufman treats them: The narrative secrets ostensibly being hidden from the audience—the source novel was lauded in part for its twist ending—are revealed pretty clearly within the first 20 minutes. So I’m going to describe what goes on, pretty clearly, and we’ll go from there.

A woman (Jesse Buckley), first seen cavorting in a hollowed-out town beset by horizontal snowfall, is picked up by her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons), while intercut shots depict an older man getting ready in a room somewhere (the fourth note I took was, is that Jake watching himself?). Across the 20-minute road-trip scene that follows—during which Kaufman indulges in jittery cuts separating fairly straightforward angles looking at the car, the first two characters (both apart and together), and out the window—we find they’re going to visit Jake’s parents. And meanwhile we realize, through synchronicities and crossovers in the film’s edits and soundtrack, that Jake and the Buckley woman’s journey is occurring within the mental landscape of that older character, a janitor working at a typical American-movie-high-school who’s presumably conjuring these protagonists up from some combination of his memories and his fantasies.

Image from I’m Thinking of Ending Things, courtesy Netflix

The centerpiece follows; a stop to see Jake’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) that begins with a grotesquely absurd dinner scene and then progresses into a time-warp mind-trip where Buckley’s character observes her would-be in-laws age towards death in nonlinear fragments (that these successive sequences are deeply indebted to two canonical works of American movie-surrealism released during Kaufman’s youth, Kubrick’s 2001 and Lynch’s Eraserhead, has been duly noted by many critics before me.) Then it’s the road again, the pair exchanging more dialogue while driving along dark paths, stopping only at a classically-American roadside storefront while en route to a destination that eventually reveals itself to be nothing less than a parallel reality. That may sound familiar: and indeed the cinematographic design of these car sequences, which make up a huge portion of the film, are emphatically indebted to the 18th hour of Lynch’s Twin Peaks (2017)—a work that I’m Thinking of Ending Things rips off to a borderline unconscionable degree, and one of the very few it doesn’t bother citing.

But of course the film has a that’s the point! vibe which prevents you from holding such charges of derivation against it. In fact the basest subtext of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, revealed plainly by the last scenes, very specifically concerns how the art we experience impacts our personal histories (speaking with Indiewire, Kaufman even said that “the meat of what the movie I made is… [about] dealing with somebody’s experience of absorbing things that they see and how they become part of his psyche.”) Yet on the other hand the central drama of the film, far more pertinent to one’s experience of actually watching it, is less that and more about the Buckley character’s creeping realization that she exists inside somebody else—and not just in a traditionally metatextual Kaufmanesque sort of way, as suggested by that aforementioned quote, but more literally too: The character is always trying to leave the scenes that she’s in, a touch from Buñuel so direct that it’s not so much even citation as quotation. 

Kaufman’s movie thus asks you to ask yourself whether she’s a figment of someone’s imagination, or a memory of a real person, or a combination of the same; and then asks you to wonder if that would allow her any free will; and then following all those ideas—which are really about fiction-writing more than about the characters themselves or anything else—it asks you to care when, say, the Buckley character is suddenly left alone in a creepy room by the whims of her daydreaming creator. Except by then the film has become so caught up in these heady ideas that its more immediate reality has lost hold, and so images meant to represent tactile mortal terror—or in the case of one hackneyed embrace, images meant to draw a tear—just leave you rolling your eyes, dutifully waiting for Kaufman to pull his next oneiric trick. Those scenes don’t play because the film itself is so overtly intellectualized, and at the same time so easily interpreted, that it never achieves the direct, intense, and linear power of genuinely surrealist film-art like—you know it—Lynch’s: Kael described Blue Velvet as “hallucinatory clinical realism”, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things loses the “clinical”, which is where the humanity of it all truly resides. [★★★]

JAKE MULLIGAN
More from author
  • JAKE MULLIGAN
    https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/
    FILM REVIEW: "ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE"
  • JAKE MULLIGAN
    https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/
    IN MEMORIAM: JOAN MICKLIN SILVER
  • JAKE MULLIGAN
    https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/
    FILM REVIEW: "ON THE ROCKS"
  • JAKE MULLIGAN
    https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/
    NOTES ON: "HAM ON RYE"

Filed Under: A+E, Film Tagged With: arts, Film, slider

WHAT’S NEW

Gov. Charlie Baker announces an educator vaccine program Wednesday in a WCVB screen capture.

STATE ADDS 400,000 EDUCATORS TO LIST FOR VACCINE

INBOX: JOHN BARROS LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN FOR MAYOR OF BOSTON

INBOX: JOHN BARROS LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN FOR MAYOR OF BOSTON

TRUMP GUY WINS THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY TO FILL DELEO’S SEAT

TRUMP GUY WINS THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY TO FILL DELEO’S SEAT

CHECKING IN ON THE COMMONWEALTH’S COMPREHENSIVE CLIMATE BILL

CHECKING IN ON THE COMMONWEALTH’S COMPREHENSIVE CLIMATE BILL

YOUNG VOTERS, OLD GAME

YOUNG VOTERS, OLD GAME

CAMPBELL ORDERS INFORMATION ON OFFICER’S INVOLVEMENT IN CAPITOL ATTACK

CAMPBELL ORDERS INFORMATION ON OFFICER’S INVOLVEMENT IN CAPITOL ATTACK

Primary Sidebar

HEMPIRE FREEDOM PACK 25% OFF

FEATURED EVENT

Most Popular

  • SPECIAL FEATURE ON THE MASS STATE POLICE: TROOPER WILSON’S WAR by CHRIS FARAONE
  • [UPDATE: WE GOT IT!] WHERE IS THE CONTRACT FOR MASSACHUSETTS’ VACCINE APPOINTMENT SOFTWARE? by POLINA WHITEHOUSE
  • BOSTON LATIN ACADEMY GRADS FIGHT FOR REPRESENTATION IN ALUMNI GROUP by CHRIS FARAONE
  • MASS KEEPS TRYING TO BUILD A NEW WOMEN’S PRISON OUTSIDE OF PUBLIC VIEW by DAN ATKINSON
  • WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH MASSACHUSETTS POLITICS AND VACCINATIONS? by ZACK HUFFMAN

READ CURRENT MEMBER EDITION

DIG Member 1.9 – 11/26/20

READ CURRENT STREET ISSUE

DIG 23.02 – 1/28/21

Footer

digbos

digbos
“No one wants to live in a world where music is “No one wants to live in a world where music is created to please a cold-blooded algorithm.” https://buff.ly/2OmuqPR #surveillance #interview #politics #tecnology
Barros is the fifth mayoral candidate to enter the Barros is the fifth mayoral candidate to enter the race. https://buff.ly/3bj3EAW #politics #election #Boston #Massachusetts
Can a veteran of the Wisconsin Uprising and former Can a veteran of the Wisconsin Uprising and former Mass union leader rescue the IAFF? https://digboston.com/a-firefighter-election/ #labor #firefighter #union #election #opinion #WisconsinUprising #Massachusetts #national
New #report shows 1/6 of women in Mass prisons sen New #report shows 1/6 of women in Mass prisons sentenced to life without parole. https://digboston.com/commonwealth-committed-to-other-death-penalty/ #prison #prisoner #humanrights #criticism #Massachusetts
“The gratuitous militarization of police forces “The gratuitous militarization of police forces across the United States facilitated by this program has helped to turn these agencies into brutal weapons of repression.” https://digboston.com/inbox-group-calls-for-biden-to-abolish-police-militarization-program/ #police #reform #criticism #Massachusetts
It’s the second time in less than a year that pr It’s the second time in less than a year that progressives have been dealt a bitter defeat in a crowded primary race. https://digboston.com/trump-guy-wins-the-democratic-primary-to-fill-deleos-seat/ #politics #election #Democrats #primary #legislature #Winthrop #Revere  #Massachusetts #MAGA #herp #derp
As lawmakers consider Baker’s amendments to clim As lawmakers consider Baker’s amendments to climate bill, the fight for environmental justice continues. https://digboston.com/checking-in-on-the-commonwealths-comprehensive-climate-bill/ #politics #legislature #environment #activism #globalwarming #Massachusetts
AS LABOR SECRETARY, WILL MARTY WALSH REPRESENT ALL AS LABOR SECRETARY, WILL MARTY WALSH REPRESENT ALL WORKERS? Or just unionized construction workers… and the corporations that fund the Democrats. The latest from DigBoston's @jasonpramas. https://digboston.com/as-labor-secretary-will-marty-walsh-represent-all-workers/ #politics #labor #union #work #national #analysis #Boston #Massachusetts
Includes Gang Green, The Freeze, SIEGE, TREE, and Includes Gang Green, The Freeze, SIEGE, TREE, and many more. https://digboston.com/iconic-lineup-comes-through-to-support-nantasket-venue-through-pandemic/ #music #digital #benefit #Hull #Massachusetts
Our interview with Avi Loeb, author of “Extrater Our interview with Avi Loeb, author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.” https://buff.ly/2O3nlUd #interview #book #alien #technology #astronomy #controversy #debate #science #Boston #Massachusetts
Load More... Follow on Instagram
Social Buttons

DigBoston facebook DigBoston Twitter DigBoston Instagram

Masthead

About

Submissions

Advertise

Privacy Policy

Customer Service

Distribution

About Us

DigBoston is a one-stop nexus for everything worth doing or knowing in the Boston area. It's an alt-weekly, it's a website, it's an e-mail blast, it's a twitter account, it's that cool party that you were at last night ... hey, you're reading it, so it's gotta be good. For advertising inquiries: [email protected] To reach Editorial: [email protected] For internship opportunities: [email protected]