Film Criticism: I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Trying to decipher each cryptic and frenzied moment in Charlie Kaufman’s newest film I’m Thinking of Ending Things is like trying to identify the nuances of a snowflake as it whizzes by you through a storm: utterly impossible until you manage to catch it up close, freezing time to examine each crystallized branch of the shape that, once realized, forms a coherent and dazzling spectacle. 

I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which stars Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley, is directed and written by Kaufman and adapted from Ian Reid’s novel of the same name. While there are some immense differences between Reid’s novel and Kaufman’s script, one of the most jolting departures is in the medium itself; whereas with a book one can pause, turn back a page, or linger over the words as they spell out their mystery, Kaufman’s film instantly envelops the viewer in a disorientating carnival ride of unsettling motifs, dizzying time warps, and long stretches of dialogue so sodden with meaning one feels as though they are wading through honey with every word that drops from Buckley’s transfixing mouth. Each mise en scène is delicious in its sheer cornucopia of confounding bits, elements building one after another like some tottering Tower of Babel that may come crashing down at any moment just as easily as it could remain, awe-inducing and perplexing.

Like its title, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is misleading in its premise that this is a story about a boy and girl and the end of their relationship. Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about a boy and a girl;  I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a madcap exploration of just how one comprehends the life they have led (or wished they had), and the tools we use to do so. In the case of this particular boy and girl, Kaufman would like us to believe the answer lies in a twisted sort of cinephilia (whether this framework for understanding comes at one’s peril or freedom is, perhaps, one of the mysteries of this film).

When thrown into a film as vexing as I’m Thinking of Ending Things, it helps to have certain anchor points which ground a viewer to the narrative so one is not left tumbling in obscene and unsettling confusion. In this case, these anchors lie in the four main actors (Toni Collette, David Thewlis, Jesse Plemons, and Jessie Buckley) who, despite leading us down numerous rabbit trails in their own volatile characterizations, function as orienting landmarks simply because they are all just so damn interesting to watch. Plemons in particular (who continues to be a strange but welcome addition to current Hollywood prestige) is one of few actors who can appear on screen and give no indication he is a Great Actor doing Great Acting as Jake, the troubled boyfriend. From his hesitant deadpan which almost-but-not-quite elicits sympathy to his profound and proverbial retreat into his own hunching body, Jake is neither hero nor foe; he simply exists, wandering the wretched corners of his mind like the halls of the high school he haunts. Collette,  Thewlis, and Buckley swirl within Jake’s consciousness as spectacles in their own right, sucking the viewer into their ever-changing and transfixing orbit. There is no way to “sort of” watch I’m Thinking of Ending Things, nor would one want to. As Jake’s girlfriend (“Lucy,” “Lucia,” “Ames…”) contemplates ending things and the two wander from one surreal setting to the next, explicit but rarely tiresome attention must be paid to each detail, each spoken word, in order to attempt an explanation at what in the living hell is going on.

I imagine Kaufman tittering with glee as he watches us wind our way through the maze of his creation, looking down from on high like some malevolent specter a la The Shining. It’s as though Kaufman took an already perplexing literary work and, deciding the source was not quite strange enough, added his signature wackadoo surrealism with wanton abandon. At the conclusion of Reid’s original novel, it is revealed Jake is not the young man the narrator (his girlfriend) has made him out to be but rather an addled, elderly janitor who is in fact thinking of ending things by taking his own life. His girlfriend is no more than wishful thinking, another ambiguous figure of his own wild imagination. Where I’m Thinking of Ending Things as a film diverges from the novel is significant: with no explanation from Reid as to the source of Jake’s profound imaginations, Kaufman invents Jake’s reliance on cinema and performance to shape his hallucinatory world.

“Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks, lingers, dominates,” the girlfriend narrates. Whether or not Kaufman’s intention was to comment on the nature of cinephilia to take on a life of its own inside avid consumers, Jake’s clear preoccupation with cinema (fictional rom coms by Robert Zemeckis, a production of Oklahoma!, a twisted fever dream of A Beautiful Mind, Pauline Kael’s book of criticism on his childhood bookshelf) is the reference he uses to create an amalgamation of his imaginary girlfriend (is she a poet? Scientist? Film student? Jake cannot decide.) and how he understands his own convoluted memories of time, aging, and his life story. Kaufman’s decision to craft his film around this particular framework was obviously a calculated choice, and is just one of many vexing elements one cannot help but examine in curiosity, like squinting at a snowflake in a storm.